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PROGRAM D-7382
Rush, rush; busy, busy; hurry, hurry! My life is full of those words, how about yours? Sometimes I think “rush” is my middle name. As I talk to Christian working people across the country, this seems to be one of the more common problems with which we all struggle. I’m talking about how we can confuse activity with accomplishment, and how a Christian fights back.
A typical day for many of us would start with rushing off to our jobs, fighting our way through rush traffic, and then rushing to meet deadlines and get the rush jobs done. We rush and hurry to try to please our managers, who seem to always want everything in a rush. Doesn’t it seem as though every job ends up in a last minute rush?
Once we leave the job, we rush to do some necessary shopping, fighting the crowds in the supermarket, and then rush on home where many duties await us and perhaps other family members as well, who are equally rushed with their lives and commitments. So, we rush through our meal, and through the evening activities we’ve planned, and then we drop into our beds exhausted, to catch a few ZZZ’s, so we can be ready to start the rush the next day.
Let me ask you a question: Do you stand in front of your microwave and say, “Come on, hurry up!”? Bet you do! We live in that kind of world where everything’s built for speed and what was fast yesterday seems slow today.
Psychiatrist C. G. Jung once remarked, “Hurry is not of the Devil; it is the Devil.” I have to stop and ask myself how much of my rushing is necessary, and how much of it is out of control and unnecessary?
As a Christian I’m learning that I have to fight back at this world system, whose message is that activity equals significance, busyness equals meaningful, rushed equals productive. We find ourselves evaluating people by the “rush factor”: The busier you are, the more important and successful you must be!
And in the midst of all that rush, the Bible says to us: “Be still and know that I am God.” Christians, of all people, should not live out of control, constantly in frantic mode, always rushed. What we need today is more Christians in the midst of this hurry-up society who demonstrate that Christ brings order into the chaos, meaning into the mundane, and tranquility into the frazzled fray.