I try really hard to not say “I am busy” when people ask me how I am.
I may say, “life is full” but I don’t want to be known as a person who is always being too busy. Busyness is not a great way to be known. The Christian life is marked by doing and obeying, but it also should just be marked by being.
Lance Witt has a great ministry to pastors and leaders who have been burned by their own busyness, among other things. He mentioned this poem, “Fire,” in a leadership session I was in with him. I mention this in the video:
FIRE ~ Judy Brown
What makes a fire burn
is space between the logs,
a breathing space.
Too much of a good thing,
too many logs
packed in too tight
can douse the flames
almost as surely
as a pail of water would.
So building fires
requires attention
to the spaces in between,
as much as to the wood.
When we are able to build
open spaces
in the same way
we have learned
to pile on the logs,
then we can come to see how
it is fuel, and absence of the fuel
together, that make fire possible.
We only need to lay a log
lightly from time to time.
A fire
grows
simply because the space is there,
with openings
in which the flame
that knows just how it wants to burn
can find its way.
