Busy Is An Ugly Word

Today is Decem­ber 7 in case you haven’t checked your cal­en­dar yet. If you live in Amer­ica, I’d be highly sur­prised if you haven’t checked your cal­en­dar 20 times already today. We are a cul­ture which seems to be obsessed with time. I recently read a cap­ti­vat­ing chap­ter out of a book called Too Small To Ignore writ­ten by Dr. Wess Stafford who is the Pres­i­dent and CEO of Com­pas­sion Inter­na­tional. I read the chap­ter in the midst of real­iz­ing how dif­fer­ently I want to live my life in 2010 and the chap­ter seemed to cor­re­spond directly with the thoughts I was hav­ing. One quote in par­tic­u­lar jumped  out at me and I’ve been think­ing about it ever since, “Time must be our ser­vant, not our mas­ter. It can­not be allowed to dic­tate to us. We must use it wisely and keep it under our con­trol.” I felt like I received a punch to the gut when I read that. In real­ity, I felt bruised and beaten all over after I was done read­ing this chap­ter on time. It was both con­vict­ing and yet enlight­en­ing. I don’t know about you, but I def­i­nitely live as a ser­vant to time.

This never became more clear to me than when I was hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with my mom recently. I told her that Vitaliy and I have been talk­ing a lot about changes we want to make in our busi­ness and life for 2010.  Her response to me was, “Well, I hope those changes will include more time spent with your Mom.” Oh, another gut punch! It was obvi­ous to me that God was speak­ing to me and it was pretty loud and clear. My pri­or­i­ties have been out of wack! But life is a learn­ing process and I’ve com­mit­ted to being a life long student.

As I thought about all the changes I wanted to make, I didn’t want to wait until Jan­u­ary 1, 2010 to make them. I didn’t want another Christ­mas to pass me by and I was too busy to even notice. I’m refus­ing to let that hap­pen this year. It’s not too late for you either; that’s why I’m post­ing this today. There are 18 days left till Christmas.

In those 18 days, we hope to begin a shift in our life — a shift towards gain­ing back con­trol over our time. I no longer want to hear this from friends, “You guys are so busy! I didn’t call cause I fig­ured you were too busy.” I’ve heard this a lot this year and every time I do it breaks my heart. I told you about my love affair with peo­ple so to hear this come out of the mouth of some­one I care about just crushes my insides. There must be more time to breathe and more time to be with those we hold dear. Aside from that my friends, I’m still learn­ing. I’m still search­ing to bet­ter under­stand that quote I men­tioned above. And I’m still seek­ing how I can make Christ­mas and all of 2010 more about what really matters.

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