Addicted to Busy: Recovery for the Rushed Soul

by Brady Boyd

There are two traps I tend to fall into regarding other people’s opinions of me. The first is the pride trap: I can take people’s affirmations of me and use them to inflate my self-assessment, my worth. I can become prideful and boastful and haughty and self-righteous and be a total jerk to be around. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, I can use others’ input as a performance bar I have to clear. I can let insecurity and the need to please eclipse everything else, and I can subsequently throw my energies at living up to the standard they’ve set for me.

Both of these traps were tempting landing spots as I listened to that sweet woman pour on the praise. But an interesting thing happened en route to one of those two miry pits: I stayed steady right there, in between. I received her compliment without letting it puff out my chest or deflate my self-concept. I took it for what it was and moved on.

The more rested you are, the less you are driven by what others think of you. The more rested you are, the more you are driven by what God, alone, believes to be true. This is a magnificent place to be, because Scripture is clear that God’s thoughts toward us are good.

And yet still, this is the tendency, isn’t it? To prioritize the insignificant over the significant, to put people in line after things.

We do this, I think, because things can be controlled but people cannot. Things can be accomplished; people are never complete. Things can be kept neat and clean; people are messy every day of their lives. And so we opt for the tidier, more predictable path.

The rest of God … is not a reward for finishing. It’s not a bonus for work well done. It’s sheer gift.

I was living as though all of life were an emergency and, consequently, never saw real crises for what they were—deviations from the norm, not the norm itself.

“Shabbat shalom”—literally, “may your day of no work be peaceful.”

“You’ve got to carve out time for rest,” I continued, which will be a problem for her, I know. During visits with other members of her church’s senior leadership team, I picked up on a distinctly workaholic vibe. And when senior leaders don’t rest, nobody rests. The bar has been set too high.

What am I supposed to do, Pastor Brady? Turn into a negligent slacker at work? This is what we think, isn’t it? That if we don’t give 100 percent every minute of every day, we are not deserving of our role. We think that if we don’t return every email and every phone call right this minute, that if we don’t make every meeting, that if we don’t respond to every request, that if we don’t apply ourselves fully at all points throughout a given day, the universe will utterly fall apart.

Expanding the idea beyond the walls of a church, we think if we don’t get every room vacuumed, every bookshelf dusted, every meal made by hand, every child’s homework folder initialed, every birthday party attended, every plant watered, every inch of grass mowed, every load of laundry folded, every lacrosse practice made, every book read, every app mastered, every televised sporting event watched, every everything done, we will somehow be lesser human beings.

“It is night after a long day. What has been done has been done; what has not been done has not been done; let it be.”

This is what I tell the men and women I oversee at New Life, that if they choose burnout for themselves (because I will certainly not inflict it on them), I will come to their funeral and I will say nice things about them, but I absolutely will not cry. I won’t cry because I will know that this is how they wanted to die; they wanted to literally run themselves into the ground.

New Life staffers know full well that I expect them to do their jobs in less than fifty hours a week and that they are not to be away from their homes more than two or three nights a week for the purposes of doing ministry. If they choose to work more hours than what I mandate, then I pull them in for a little chat.

During those conversations, I remind them that if they do wish to burn out, there are plenty of churches around this country that will welcome them with open arms. But New Life is not one of them.

To refuse Sabbath is in effect to spurn the gift of freedom. It is to resume willingly what we once cried out for God to deliver us from. It is choosing what we once shunned. Slaves don’t rest. Slaves can’t rest. Slaves, by definition, have no freedom to rest. Rest, it turns out, is a condition of liberty.… Sabbath is a refusal to go back to Egypt.

“Well, you can’t put a price on keeping kids out of trouble these days. When they’re busy, they don’t have sex. When they’re busy, they don’t do drugs. When they’re busy, they don’t hang out with the wrong crowd—for me, that price is the one I don’t want to pay.”

To that issue of differentiating when it’s time to engage and when it’s time to withdraw, I notice that Jesus did another thing really well: he listened to the voice of his Father, and he let those divine whispers guide his life.

“What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything,” Pedro Arrupe said. “It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you will do with your evening, how you spend your weekends, what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.”

What concerned him was being hidden away in the character of his Father, and from there living life at peace.

To be ostracized and hidden away, to feel like we’re missing out on something, is a real challenge, regardless of who we are. And yet it is here—in obscurity—where we’re actually most likely to thrive.

We struggle to tithe because it costs us money. We struggle to pray because it costs us time. We struggle to fast because it costs us focus. And we struggle to do anything that is costly for God, if we aren’t sure we’ll be recognized for it somehow. Oh, sure, we’ll do the thing. But then we’ll burn with the need to tell somebody, to review why all this godly grease is all over our hair. We’ll refuse to rest until the points get put on our scoreboard, until everyone who may be watching knows just how awesome with a capital A we are.

Are we speaking, posting, tweeting, or otherwise broadcasting things so that people will be impressed with us, or so that they’ll be impressed with our God?

I’m reminded it’s okay to leave my promotion in his capable hands.

In his words, he began viewing obscure service as “peace, not punishment.”

“This may be one of the reasons we are so averse to play and prefer the tedium of work,” wrote Allender. “Freedom scares us. We demand freedom, yet we fear the risk required to recreate in a manner that has such openness, vulnerability, and potential for failure.”

A gift is something everybody likes. Who can refuse a gift? When someone offers to buy me a nice meal, for instance, or I’ve been invited to use a friend’s beach home, or I get an unexpected treat in the mail, these things don’t exactly add stress to my life. They make me exhale, they make my shoulders fall, and they make me smile. The effect is the very opposite of stress, which is the point exactly. This is how it goes with a gift and how it ought to go with rest.

the reality is that we always have to come down. We can’t stay up forever.

When I compare myself to the Good Samaritan, I feel a little inferior, truth be told. Sure, maybe he didn’t wake that morning thinking, I believe I’ll hunt for an outreach opportunity today. But I’ll guarantee you this much: he had margin to offer to God. He had left enough margin in his schedule, in his spending patterns, and in his soul, that he could be used in a missional way.

A conclusion, among several, was this: “Ethics become a luxury as the speed of our daily lives increases.”5 In other words, we don’t have time to be do-gooders, when doing good will take too much of our time.

I want to be findable to God too. I want to live life like that every day: accessible, available, and all-the-way alive.

retreat, refresh your soul, and renew your focus. That’s it—the three tenets of effective rest.