Give this a try: the next ten people you see face-to-face, pose the question, “How ya been lately?” And then count how many times you hear this in response: “Busy. Sooo busy.” I’m willing to bet you’ll go ten for ten.
What’s not discussed in these I’m-so-busy-it-would-blow-your-mind discussions is the motivation for all that busyness. I have a theory on this, which is that busyness is our means to impress. If I’m busy, then I’m important, and if I’m important, then you’ll be impressed. Right? Don’t you do this too? A buddy calls you up and asks about having lunch sometime soon, and instead of answering succinctly, you feel compelled to give him the rundown of your (very busy, very important) week. “Well, I’ve got an offsite all day Monday, I’m wall-to-wall meetings on Tuesday, Wednesday is an extended morning session with the board, and Thursday—well, it’s already in the tank!”
Seriously. Why couldn’t you just say no? Or, at a minimum, why couldn’t you say, “What a kind offer. You know, I could swing Friday this week. Or else would something early next week work for you?”
Here’s why you can’t say that: because that is not an impressive reply. And boy, how we love to impress. “Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness,” one author writes. “Obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.”
We buy more house than we can afford, we elevate vacation stories to epic proportions, we use up the better part of a bottle of hairspray each morning, and we refuse to let others see us rest. Oh, the things we do in the name of impression management. We all want to be important. We all want our little lives to count. And yet we’re going about it in entirely the wrong way. All the posing and posturing and performing may help you hit the quota, win the award, and be the guy who saves the day. But in terms of encouraging the stuff of righteousness? It won’t even get you to step one.
Jesus said that all our boasting may get us some things, but it won’t get us the one thing we truly seek, which is the soul-filling love of our Father, the sense that we’re acceptable as we are. “Everything in the world,”
In the Gospel of Matthew, we are told not to be like the hypocrites, who love to pray to be seen by men, who love to flaunt their spirituality and their superiority, who love to devote themselves to trying to impress. No, instead, Jesus says, we are to work on the inner self, spending our energies developing things such as a gentle spirit, which according to
A gentle spirit—something we humans can’t cultivate on the go.
Along the way, my family and I sort of institutionalized the practice of ditching impression management and working toward a quiet, gentle spirit instead. Once a week, we’d hole away for an entire day with nothing on the agenda and nobody to impress. My wife and my kids and I would wake when our bodies were done sleeping, instead of being jolted up by a blaring alarm. We’d ignore the hands on the clock, and open our own hands to an unscheduled day. We’d eat when we got hungry, move when we got antsy, rest when we got weary, and let the day come to us instead of maniacally chasing it down. Smartphones weren’t the rage yet, but desktop computers were, and we took pains to keep ours shut down, to experience life not virtually but firsthand, here, in real time. Mostly, we puttered. We ambled. Once a week, beautifully, we took a long, slow stroll through our day. “Hurry is the sure sign of an amateur,” writes Ann Voskamp. If she’s right—and I think she is—then once a week, we Boyds were total pros.
On Bedhead Days, Be Lazy
“Bedhead days,” we came to call them, these times of extricating ourselves from the clutches of busy and intentionally focusing on rest. We didn’t have any rules on our bedhead days—in fact, rules would have mucked everything up. But if there were three guiding principles that emerged over time, they were be lazy, be together, and give grace.
Suffice it to say, the most obvious thing I rested from on those bedhead days was the clock, the calendar, the ever-pressing need to go, go, go. But just as important was my practice of resting from people’s expectations of me. I’ve always been pegged as a “driver” personality, and as such have enjoyed being known as the action-oriented one, the can-do one, the solution-seeking one, the guy who is responsible and reliable and strong and generally in charge. I like all these roles because they convince me I’m bringing value to the world.
Surely you can relate.
Maybe you’re the optimistic one, or the one who always organizes social gatherings, or the one who is great at fundraising, or the one who always remembers snacks. Maybe you’re the sparkling conversationalist or the steady listener or the master of little-known facts or the bleeding heart. Whatever your role may be, you probably like playing that role. We tend to attach our self-worth to these roles, but on a bedhead day, it’s time to lay them down. It’s time to rest from our roles, and bask in the fact that we’re loved for who—not what—we are. This is a terrifying and also marvelous thing to do, by the way. I dare you to try it. Just for a few hours, lay down all the stuff others think about you, all the roles you’re asked to play. See if that newfound nakedness doesn’t suit you. I guarantee you’ll relish you’re stripped-down state.
Every January our church engages in twenty-one days of prayer and fasting, as a way to kick off the New Year in a contemplative way. During week two of the endeavor this year, a dear woman approached me following one of the prayer meetings and asked if she could have a word with me. She is a long-time New Lifer, a faithful servant, and someone who has been nothing but encouraging to me since my first week on the job. But this time, her encouragement soared to new heights. She was several minutes into her monologue of praise regarding my preaching, my teaching, my leadership, and my general greatness as a human being, when I realized she wasn’t at all describing me. Sure, she was describing her ideal of me, but the description was not me.
When she finished her well-meaning speech, I thanked her for her graciousness and kindness, for believing the very best about me. But privately, silently, I told myself to take it for what it was: a compliment, and nothing more.
There are two traps I tend to fall into, regarding other people’s opinions of me. The first is the pride trap: I can take people’s affirmations of me and use them to inflate my self-assessment, my worth. I can become prideful and boastful and haughty and self-righteous and be a total jerk to be around. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, I can use others’ input as a performance bar I have to clear. I can let insecurity and the need to please eclipse everything else, and I can subsequently throw my energies at living up to the standard they’ve set for me.
Both of these traps were tempting landing spots, as I listened to that sweet lady pour on the praise. But an interesting thing happened en route to one of those two miry pits: I stayed steady right there, in between. I received her compliment without letting it puff out my chest or deflate my self-concept. I took it for what it was and moved on. Interestingly, I had enjoyed a bedhead day the day before that conversation, and I believe firmly that because I had spent the previous twenty-four hours resting—yes, from the clock, but also resting from people’s expectations of me—I was able to respond with maturity and grace.
See if you don’t find this to be true, as you make strides toward living rhythmically: the more rested you are, the less you are driven by what others think of you. The more rested you are, the more you are driven by what God, alone, believes to be true. This is a magnificent place to be, because Scripture is clear that his thoughts toward us are good.
This brings me to what all this rest is for. We rest not just to be caught up on sleep or to build up our immune system or to keep our bones healthy and strong—although all these things do happen as a result. We also rest for a deeper purpose, the purpose of meditating on the things of God—his character, his creation, his “come to me” promise—the realest of real invitations to rest. Sleeping in. A long walk. Watching the wind blow by. A picnic lunch. Pushing your kid on a swing. Reading ten pages of a good novel. Savoring a piece of dark chocolate. Mowing your lawn slowly, while listening to the Eagles’ Greatest Hits. There are a thousand ways to push pause on the rush, to inject a little lazy into even the craziest of weeks.
On Bedhead Days, Be Together
A second guiding principle for us Boyds was easier to practice than the first: be together. We love to be together, so this was sort of a given in our lives already. But still, as weeks turned into months and months turned into years and our kids grew up and outgrew their need to be no more than six feet from Mom and Dad, it was important for us to reinforce the importance of togetherness.
Sometimes we’re reminded the hard way, as was the case for one guy on board during the “Miracle on the Hudson” event.
In the middle of the afternoon on January 15, 2009, US Airways flight 1549 took off from LaGuardia Airport in New York City, bound for Nashville, Tennessee. It was supposed to be an uneventful flight, but three minutes into the plane’s ascent, passengers gathered that they were in for a wild ride. The captain, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, came over the intercom with a three-word request: “Brace for impact.”
Evidently, upon takeoff the plane had struck a flock of Canadian geese, which took out both engines in one fell swoop. Air-traffic controllers directed the captain toward nearby Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, but there wasn’t enough time to get there. Captain Sullenberger chose the nearest “runway” he could find to land the plane: the middle of the Hudson River.
As expected, the 150 passengers on board put their heads in their laps and began to pray. I don’t know about you, but I’d be praying too. When you’re in a plane that suddenly goes silent and you see nothing but freezing-cold water below, the only natural reaction is to pray. And fast.
One of those pray-ers that day was Puerto Rican businessman Ric Elias. He lived to tell his story, thanks to some crafty maneuvering from the captain of the flight, who ditched the plane into the river in such a way that every single person survived, all but two without any injury whatsoever. But the crash was still harrowing, and in the minutes it took to actually reach the river, Elias did some deep, if not quick, soul searching. You can learn a lot about people based on how they respond in a crisis, which is why I find his takeaway so interesting: “In that moment,” he said, “I regretted the time I was wasting, confusing the things that did not matter with the people who do.”
There it is: the importance of togetherness. We matter more than stuff ever will.
And yet still, this is the tendency, isn’t it, to prioritize the insignificant over the significant, to put people in line after things. We run around like crazed Marthas, forgetting entirely that it was Mary whom Jesus praised. We do this, I think, because things can be controlled and people cannot. Things can be accomplished; people are never complete. Things can be kept neat and clean; people are messy every day of their lives. And so we opt for the tidier, more predictable path. To insist on togetherness—at least once a week, anyway—was for us Boyds way of saying to each other, “Yes, I know you’re messy and disheveled and sometimes annoying and quirky and rude, but I’m in. I’m in because I can be all those things too, and just as desperately I need people in my life who will love me anyway.”
On Bedhead Days, Give Grace
And then, a third guideline: give grace.
Last week, my assistant, Lex, asked me if I was still working on a book about rest. She’d eyed my calendar on her computer screen mere moments before, which told me it was a loaded question. “I am,” I said with a knowing grin, to which she replied, “So your plan is to start living what you’re preaching after you write the book?”
Laughing, I turned to walk back into my office, but not before saying, “Grace, Lex. Grace.”
Despite my best intentions regarding a once-weekly bedhead day, there are weeks when my careful plan doesn’t pan out. In those instances, I practice giving myself grace. Rest isn’t an obligation; it’s a gift—more on this topic in chapter 9. “The rest of God is not a reward for finishing,” writes Mark Buchanan. “It’s not a bonus for work well done. It’s sheer gift.” As often as I possibly can, I receive that gift with open arms. But sometimes life presents obstacles that are unavoidable, and the gift sits there, still beautifully wrapped.
A month ago, a massive wildfire overtook our local news coverage and our very lives, and our church was converted to a Red Cross shelter to house displaced residents from area neighborhoods. I was helping staff the shelter with a team of New Lifers, making sure evacuees had food and bottles of water and warm blankets and sturdy cots, all on the day that was my bedhead day for the week. Still, I knew I was where I needed to be, even as my day of rest was usurped. As I put my head on my pillow that night, I thought about how grateful I am for the progress I’ve made over the years, with regard to living a rhythmic life.
This fire was a bona fide emergency, but there was a time in my life when I wouldn’t have perceived it as such. Back then I was living as though all of life were an emergency and, consequently, never saw real crises for what they were—deviations from the norm, not the norm itself. I was learning, wasn’t I. Against all odds, I was becoming something of a Sabbath keeper—not a perfect one, admittedly, but one who practiced, anyway. “Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time,” Anne Lamott once said. “Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.”
1 Tim Kreider, “The Busy Trap.” The New York Times, June 30, 2012.
2 Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010), 66.
3 http://www.nbcnews.com/id/28678669/ns/us_news-life/t/ny-jet-crash-called-miracle-hudson/; retrieved June 20, 2013.
4 http://www.ted.com/talks/ric_elias.html; retrieved June 20, 2013.
5 Mark Buchanan, The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath, (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2006), 93.
6 Anne Lamott, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012), 85.
Excerpted from Addicted to Busy: Recovery for the Rushed Soul by Brady Boyd.
