I like to stay busy. I don’t like to rest. This fact I’ve written about before. It’s a flaw in my character that I recognize and am actively working to correct. The flipside of rest is busyness, hustle, perpetual engagement, and activity. And the contemporary world pushes us towards that busyness, pushes us to be constantly engaged with content, ideas, work, devices, activities, duties, cleaning, exercise, self-improvement, home improvement, and so on. There’s a flow to existence that we get drawn into very early in our lives, and soon we discover we’re being carried along a stream of To-Do’s and Obligations without ever really choosing some of them, consciously. Busyness can become a zombie-like existence, making the kids’ lunches, making your lunch, showering, going to work, driving through traffic, paying bills, scrolling in bed, falling asleep.
And yet, a certain kind of industriousness is praised in the Bible. Take Proverbs 6:
6 Go to the ant, O sluggard;
consider her ways, and be wise.
7 Without having any chief,
officer, or ruler,
8 she prepares her bread in summer
and gathers her food in harvest.
9 How long will you lie there, O sluggard?
When will you arise from your sleep?
10 A little sleep, a little slumber,
a little folding of the hands to rest,
11 and poverty will come upon you like a robber,
and want like an armed man.
And there is a reality that daily life often requires grinding out bills, household chores, taking care of people you are responsible for, plus fulfilling any job you might have and taking care of your health and hygiene. Oh, also spending time in the Word and with God. That reality isn’t bad. It’s a part of life. And although tiring, it’s beautiful. You can go to bed fulfilled.
But it can become disordered, intemperate, bent toward acedia: a spiritual apathy (sloth), a belief that there is nothing worth truly caring about. It is a form of despair about life that can be hidden behind busyness and frantic activity. You may be avoiding the physical sluggardry warned of in Proverbs 6, but what about the spiritual sloth? We sometimes keep ourselves from our suffering and our need for Jesus through busyness. So it’s worth asking, What is your busyness doing?
It seems to me that busyness is deceptive. It often starts out virtuous, a courageous effort to manage the daily affairs of your life for the sake of your loved ones and to honor God—in the model of the ant. But the rhythms of hustle can overtake you. They can be seductive. There is a numbness that sets in when you are busy. Your mind is preoccupied with obligations and must-do’s and planning for the future so that sins, conflicts, problems, and issues in your life that aren’t directly related to your busyness get submerged, ignored. What started out virtuous seems to take up more and more space in your consciousness. You begin answering emails at all hours of the day. You check your phone constantly. You feel the need to stay “plugged in.” You feel uncomfortable when you aren’t actively doing something “productive.” This is acedia. And it’s tied to the refusal to believe that God is sovereign over all creation.
Despair is a complex and surprising condition which can manifest in people in different ways. For some of us, despair appears most prominently in our hustle. In our restlessness, in our inability to rest, in our disordered love of busyness. The despair at work is a lack of hope that God can sovereignly take care of our world. That he doesn’t need us to uphold our existence. It’s also the lack of hope that Christ can heal our wounds, can guide us through our conflicts, can help us sort out our problems, and forgive our sins, and so in despair we submerge them. We stay busy so that we don’t have to acknowledge and deal with those realities.
But we serve a God who loves us and desires our good, including our healing. Whatever troubles, suffering, problems, or sins we are struggling with, Christ desires that we bring them to him. That bringing-to-Christ is the opposite of sloth, of acedia. It’s acknowledging who we are in comparison to God and acknowledging our need of God and our finitude and embracing that and crying out for help, as David does so many times in the Psalms.
And we serve a God who invites us to rest, not just on Sundays (although especially then), but everyday, to rest in him. Because he is the one upholding existence. In him we live and move and having our being (Acts 17:28), not in ourselves. We are always already resting in God. Despair whispers to us, “You can’t trust God to uphold you. You’d better pull yourself together.” And so you rush around desperately trying to do what only God can do: keep you.
But this still leaves the reality, mentioned earlier, of a busy life. We are still called to go to the ant and be industrious, disciplined, and courageous. Bills must get paid, children must be driven to practice, work projects must be done, the floor must be swept. And so our responsibility is to work heartily unto the Lord (Colossians 3:23), before the Lord, with the Lord in mind. Surveying ourselves and asking ourselves regularly, “What is this busyness for?” “Who is this busyness serving?” “What is this busyness revealing about my heart?”
This are not comfortable questions to ask. Not for me at least. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t think we, on our own, can always disentangle the sense of satisfaction and purpose we rightly feel from a job well done from the sense of pseudo-peace we receive from avoiding our struggles or trusting in our own horses. This is where the work of the Holy Spirit is so important. We need to pray and ask God to help reveal to us those areas of our busyness that are honoring to him, and those areas where we have slipped into acedia, into despair. We need God to use the Holy Spirit to reveal to us where in our hearts we are turning something good into something intemperate.
It is right and good for us to use our time wisely, for the days are evil (Ephesians 5:16). But in our quest to be prudent with our work and to work with excellence the World is going to try to lure us into despair and the power of what Pieper calls Total Work and what I would describe as Total Engagement, where we are constantly engaged with some screen or activity or busyness, leaving no time for contemplation or meditation or prayer or the imagination or rest. And the goal of this totalizing project is the assertion that you are your own and belong to yourself, that you are responsible for your self-existence, which is a form of despair. Resting in God and his love for you and his desire to forgive you and heal your wounds is compatible with working heartily unto the Lord, but I think it requires vigilance in a World that always asks us to do more and despair.
Some housekeeping: I will be out of town next week and will probably not be posting anything. Sorry for the pause. I’ll be back the following week!
Thanks for the new term "Acedia" Alan. You really got to the heart of the matter with this one.
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Enjoy your vacation. The book I use with coaching clients to help with this is Minute of Margin by Dr Richard Swenson. Highly recommend.