Don't Use Busyness to Avoid Your Problems

We are busy people living in a frenetic-paced world. That is a fact of life. The most acceptable social response to, "How are you doing?" is "Busy" and then we laugh and say, "But what else is new?" Our technologically-motivated, severely social (media) world forces us to move at a rapid pace. It mandates our schedule.

Busyness in itself is not bad. If we busy ourselves with good works and equally make time for rest, we can use busyness to our advantage. It ultimately depends on what we're busy with and how we're busy with it.

So then, busyness can be good or it can alternately be very bad.

One particular way it can become bad is when we use it to escape our problems. There is a point that almost all of us have visited where being busy becomes a scapegoat for dealing with reality. We use it as an excuse to avoid hashing out and working through a conflict.

When we don't have to sit down and eat dinner as a family, we don't have to deal with underlying resentment. When we don't have time to fill out college applications, we don't have to deal with our parents' expectations. Busyness gives us an escape.

This becomes a dangerous and unhealthy way to deal with our problems and our fears. Avoiding reality under the guise of busyness is selfish and single-focused. Our lives are a part of something bigger than just ourselves. Escaping our problems temporarily through busyness is simply putting off the inevitable; we will have to deal with reality. Putting it off simply wastes precious time and self-inflicts us with an unneeded sense of turmoil.  

So then, the next time you are tempted to use busyness as a scapegoat to avoid conflict, consider your own heart. Are you putting the needs of others above yourself? And are you using your time in the most godly way possible?