Confronting our drivenness

Yesterday three quite separate and apparently random occurrences caused me to reflect upon why so many of us are so ‘driven’.

In the morning I had been reading from Mark chapter 1 and was struck (not for the first time) by the way in which Jesus got up early, before it was light, to get some time to be on his own to pray (vs 35ff). I remembered the title of a book I read some years ago by Bill Hybels ‘Too busy not to pray’.

However, I was also struck by the fact that Jesus seems to have been trying to escape the crowd, the demands and the pressures (see vs 36 & 37).

None of us can go on and on giving. We need time apart. Time to be on our own; time to be with God; time with those closest to us (and elsewhere in the Gospels we find Jesus drawing his disciples aside for such times).

Later in the day I was visiting in the hospital and I bumped into a colleague who was also visiting. We got chatting and again there arose this whole issue of work pressures, time off, spending time with family and so on. We reflected on how we both were guilty of allowing the demands of ministry to determine our priorities, and that other things (and not least marriage and family!) could suffer as a result.

As I drove back from the hospital I thought a bit about both my morning reading and this conversation. Why are we like this?

Is it a response to the needs of others? If so, why are we not better at responding to the needs of our nearest and dearest?!?

Is it because we feel that this busyness reflects the fact that we have been called by God to serve him in a particular way? If so, then why are we not better at following the pattern of Jesus by whom we have been called and whom we claim to follow, who drew apart to be alone, to escape the crowds, to pray, to be with those closest to him?

Or is it in fact because we are at some unconscious (or is it really that unconscious?) level meeting our own needs? Our need to ‘matter’, our need to be loved and appreciated by others, our need to be of value, our need to justify ourselves by our busyness, our need to assuage our guilt? If any of these is the case (and I fear that several of them may be the case for many of us!) then somewhere and somehow our theology has gone sadly awry. And who suffers? Well, we do... our spiritual, social and personal well-being is compromised. Our family and married life also suffers, and that is utterly tragic. Are our vows at marriage and the baptism of our children somehow secondary to our ordination vows?!? But in the end our ministry suffers too, as do those to whom we minister.

I said that there were three things yesterday that struck me. What was the third? In the evening I opened the newspaper and late on came across an article (I read it in a different paper, but a version of it appears here http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/why-four-hour-working-days-might-be-just-as-effective-as-working-9-5-a3436766.html ) which claimed that to work long hours is often to work inefficiently and that we could in fact get more done by working less! I rather liked one of the assertions in the article ‘meetings should never be longer than 40 minutes long’!  The article was headed ‘How to do a full day’s work in only four hours’, although that was not quite the claim actually made in the article nor in the book to which it was referring. Nonetheless, the points in the article did make me reflect further.

Why are we so driven? Why are we so wedded to the notion that long hours means efficient, fruitful or faithful work? Whose needs are we really seeking to meet? What would really please the God who rested after creating, who commanded a Sabbath rest for humanity and whose Son sought solitude and space?