The New Year always leads me to reflect. Therefore, may I ask you a question? Do you live your daily life directed by a compass or a clock?
Everyone I know feels too busy. But too busy for what? Often too busy to create and maintain a meaningful life.
We have bought into a toxic lie. We believe that when we’re busy, we must be doing something important. The more we get done, the better we feel.
The danger of this lifestyle is that it never ends. We have to continue to produce more, check more off our list, get more done just to feel good. We start to feel like a hamster on a gigantic wheel and we don’t know how to get off that wheel without our entire empire crashing.
People have said to me, “Leslie, I don’t know how you do it all.” Or “wow, you must really be busy doing God’s work.”
When I am clear minded and in tune with God I say to them, “Don’t be fooled.
Chronic busyness is nothing more than a false sense of your own importance, not a mark of true spirituality.”
Take a moment and ask yourself. Do you feel that being too busy contributes to your negative moods and misery?
Our entire lives have turned into an exercise in hurry. In packing as much as we can into every minute of our day. Even when I walk my dog, I find myself telling her to hurry up and pee so I can get on to more important things.
As a culture we are time sick and I want you to know what this costs you.
Doctor’s offices are packed with people suffering from the conditions brought on by stress: insomnia, migraines, hypertension, asthma, and gastrointestinal trouble.
Burnout used to be something that we mainly found in people over forty, but how we’re seeing people in their 30s and 20s who are completely burned out.
To keep pace with the modern world, people are resorting to more potent chemicals keep up. Cocaine remains the booster of choice among white-color professionals, but amphetamines are catching up fast. We take pills to get more done, we drink alcohol to unwind.
We’re not sleeping enough because we believe we get more done if we stay up late or get up early. The average America now gets ninety minutes less sleep than she did 100 years ago.
Did you know that drowsiness causes more car accidents than alcohol?
Where is this obsession with speed going? For some of us even “Instant gratification now a days isn’t fast enough. People who slow us down become the enemy.
Road rage, air rage, shopping rage, relationship rage, office rage – thanks to our obsession with going faster we live in the age of rage.
We believe if we are busy we must be having a meaningful life. But it is an illusion. A deception. It’s living by clock time. Notice what happens when you spin the blades of a fan. You get the impression of something solid.
It’s only when you slow it down do you realize it is not what you think. Slowing down helps you build a more meaningful, intentional life. A life run by a compass, not a clock.
The New Year motivates people to stop and reflect on where they are heading. I’d encourage you to start by changing your orientation from clock time to compass time.
Learn to LIVE ON PURPOSE and with purpose. Don’t let the urgent dictate your schedule. Instead ask yourself – What’s most important to you? What matters most now?
When you live by clock time you’re busy but without reflection. Without being intentional about who you are, where you want to go and who God has made you to be (become). Reflection on your use of time gives you crucial information about whether or not you are heading in the direction you want to end up. In other words, without reflection, you’ve lost your compass.
You and I only have so much time, so much energy to do what we are called to do in this life. Jesus only lived 33 years but he said, “It is finished.” He knew who he was, and what he was called to do. He lived in compass time not clock time and lived on purpose, with purpose.
Slow down. Reflect and ask yourself, “What’s most important?” Then orient your time around that purpose instead of simply staying busy getting things done.
You can stay very busy, driving in circles for hours, using up your time and valuable gasoline (energy). But if you don’t know where you’re going or where you want to end up, in the end, it’s meaningless.
