I was in Richmond this week for a program committee meeting. The BGAV annual meeting will be in Hampton Roads this year November 13-15. The theme is: “Answering God's Call...What Now?” “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’” Isaiah 6:8. We have been working hard to prepare for this year’s meeting. It is going to be a great time of celebration and preparing for the future. I hope that you will plan to be a part of it. During a break, I was talking with our executive director, John Upton, about how busy our life is. How we have all this stuff that we are doing for work, school, sports, clubs, friends, volunteering for different things and projects that we feel strongly about. All of this good stuff – the problem is that we sometimes get so focused on doing that that we forget to make time for our relationships with people and more importantly, with God. While we were talking, John asked me if I knew the Chinese word for “busy.” I did not, and to be honest, I could not say the word or recognize it if I had to. However, what made an impression is the literal translation. Chinese does not have a phonetic alphabet, but uses characters that have meanings. He told me that there are two English words that the Chinese characters represent that we translate into the word “busy.” Their literal meanings are “heart” and “death.” So the literal translation of the Chinese “busy” is “Heart Death”. When we fill our lives so full of things that have to be done, we literally lose our joy, and can cause so much stress and pressure that we have a heart attack. That really resounded with me because what is the first thing that we stop taking care of when we get too busy? The things should be most important – often diet and exercise and more importantly, our relationships with family, God, and friends. We look up and say, “I have been so busy, where have the last two weeks gone, the last two months, the last few years gone? Weren’t the kids in first grade just yesterday?” I cannot remember what I have been doing because I wasn’t really living, I was just surviving all the stuff that needed to be done to get through the day. Now to be fair, we all have times like this in our lives; trouble comes and we have to step up and do more and work harder to get through the crisis. However, this kind of imbalance is not meant to be a permanent lifestyle. It is meant to be for a season of time. God shows us this example in Genesis 2:2, “By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work.” Exodus also show us how much we need to rest and spend time worshiping Him by making a Holy Sabbath a part of the Ten Commandments. Exodus 20: 8-11, “8 “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, … 11 For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
We all need to commit to carving out time for rest and worship in our lives or we will one day look up and ask, “What am I doing all this for?” I have missed out on all the important things in life.” If we aren’t intentional about making time for rest and worship, Satan will gladly use our busy-ness to “steal and kill and destroy” us (John 10:10). God wants us to have “life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). If God sees the importance of stopping, reflecting, enjoying, and resting don’t you think we might want follow his example?
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