The Busy Bug

As I have been starting my summer I have noticed an interesting set of phenomenon.  The first is what happens when people ask me about my plans for the summer.  My reply usually involves a rambling explanation about how I’m planning to work on my musical and other projects that I kept on putting off because of school, and how I’m going to do things around the house and get ready for the drama team I’m planning to lead next school year… and all of that is true.  But really, my plan for the summer is to rest and to thoroughly enjoy it!  So why do I feel like I need to make myself sound a lot busier than I am planning to be?  Am I afraid that I am going to be judged?  That people will think that I’m being lazy or wasting time?

The other thing I have noticed is my own need to feel busy.  There have been several days in the past couple of weeks where I have been so tired that I literally lay around all day and didn’t get anything done.  I felt very useless and self-conscious!  It was as if my identity was being threatened by the fact that I wasn’t able to accomplish things, and that I even had to ask Jesse to make dinner when he got home from work!  At first my tired days were filled with “filler”: watching movies, playing games on my laptop, anything to distract me from the fact I wasn’t being busy, anything to fool my mind into thinking it was being productive.  But then even that got tiring.  I lost interest in watching movies, and even playing computer games seemed to take too much energy.  That was when I noticed what I had been doing.  I was not ok with just being still.  I was terrified of being “useless”.  I had caught the “busy bug”.

I don’t think this is something that is unique to me.  I see it all around our culture.  Spare time needs to be filled with something.  Silence needs to be filled with noise.  We pack our lives full – of work, material things, activities, and entertainment.  I think that media is especially useful in our human endeavor to never have a moment of stillness.  It can conveniently fill up every spare moment of our waking hours – go on facebook while eating breakfast, play a game on your phone while waiting for an appointment, eat supper in front of the TV, spend the evening playing video games or surfing the web.  Then you can always be busy, even when you don’t have work or meetings or social engagements.

I’m not dissing technology, well I kind of am, but that’s not the point.  The point is – why do we avoid silence?  Why are we so afraid of empty space?

I have come to believe that stillness and silence and rest are vitally important.  This has been a learning process for me, despite my tendency to get caught back up in the whirlwind of the busy bug.  There are so many things that we can learn through resting that we tend to miss when we are so busy.

One is our value.  I’ve been learning a lot about this in the past couple weeks.  My value should not be found in the fact that I’m an A student, or that I can host a great games night, or that I cook my family healthy meals, or anything else that I do.  Ultimately my value comes from being a child of God, and that is something that I AM, not something that I do.  I should be doing all these good things out of that place of value, not as a way to try to earn value.  Then, when I can't do as much as I normally can, I can be confident in the fact that that does not change my value!

Another thing that I have been finding is that stillness is something that God wants.  It’s all over the Bible, not least in a verse from my favourite Psalm: “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10a).  But it is especially found in the concept of Sabbath.  The idea of working 6 days and resting the 7th was not just some law to make people’s lives miserable, it was actually a beautiful gift.  There is so much that could be said about Sabbath, but here is just one thought that I have been mulling over lately.  In Deuteronomy 5, the people of Israel are told to observe the Sabbath and remember that they used to be slaves in Egypt.  Slaves work 7 days a week – they don’t get any breaks, they don’t get to rest.  But God saved the Israelites from slavery and now they never again would have to work 7 days a week – they were free.  In Jesus Christ, we are also set free – so why do we feel like we have to work all of the time?  Why is our value so caught up in what we do, what we can accomplish?  God invites us to rest, because our value is secure in him!  We don’t need to be enslaved to the busy bug!

So this summer, I plan on enjoying some rest, though it may take me most of the summer to detox the busy bug from my system!  As a fellow wayfarer, I encourage you to learn what it means to rest, and to enjoy some time this summer – not just away from work, but in true rest.