Heart Killer

“I’ve been busy.”

How often is this my default response to “How are you?”? How often do we hear this in the midst of our daily conversations? Author Wayne Muller in his book “Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal and Delight in our Busy Lives” writes, “We say this to one another with no small degree of pride, as if our exhaustion were a trophy, our ability to withstand stress a mark of real character. The busier we are, the more important we seem to ourselves and, we imagine, to others. To be unavailable to our friends and family, to be unable to find time for the sunset (or even to know that the sun has set at all), to whiz through our obligations without time for a single, mindful breath, this has become the model of a successful life.”

“The press of busyness is like a charm,

Its power swells…

it reaches out seeking always

to lay hold of ever-younger victim…”
(Søren Kierkegaard)

Perhaps the Ancient Chinese have long had insight into this that the West has yet to discover. The ancient Chinese pictograph for the word busy is made up of the symbols/pictures heart and killing.

The understood that as we become busier and busier in the world around us, our hearts are prone to experience death – lifelessness.

Our world has become the world of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland:

“Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do,
to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else,
you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

The challenging-life-altering question is:

Will we continue and try to "run as fast as we can" or will we learn to begin living in Slow Motion, Pausing, Reflecting, and Begin Experiencing Elements of the Full Life Christ promised...