The Roots of Busyness

I am resisting the lie that more work will make me a better person.
— Greg Asimakoupoulos

The other day my 8 year old expressed her displeasure over the number of times church commitments pirate me away from participating in her bedtime ritual:

“It’s not fair, Daddy,” Kristin protested. “Can’t you call the church and tell them you’re busy? Please stay home with us. Let’s make popcorn!”

“Tomorrow night, sweetheart,” I thought aloud. “I promise. We’ll have popcorn and root beer floats tomorrow. I don’t think I’m busy after dinner.”

Her complaint caught me by surprise. I had only recently curtailed my evening appointments to three a week. As I tried to explain the price tag of being a productive pastor, her big brown eyes puddled with tears.

“But Daddy, you’re always busy!”

Ouch! That hurt. Kristin’s response found an unprotected gap in my priestly armor. But her comment provided me an overdue check on reality.

Was I always busy? And if I was, why?

My daughter’s appraisal, I quickly discovered, was correct. When I wasn’t preparing to preach, preaching, or spending time with those I preach to, I was preoccupied with ways I could do all three better.

My preoccupation with activity began early on in my ministry. A bachelor pastor for four years, I crowded my life with job commitments, which also doubled to meet my social and emotional needs. My identity was defined by staying busy.

Once I married, though, I thought my eighty-hour-a-week schedule would change. After all, I had an attractive reason to retreat from my study at the end of the afternoon. But it wasn’t as easy as I thought.

Even today, when my day off rolls around, my body never seems to notify my mind that sleeping in, riding a bike, catching a movie, or crashing on the couch in front of the tv would be okay. I usually opt for critiquing the previous day’s sermon, the organist’s performance, wondering why the Whozits weren’t in worship, or mentally clearing off my desk.

A typical day finds me arriving home after a nine-hour, nonstop trek. My girls want to tell me about their school days, but my mind is elsewhere. I fight the temptation to reach for the phone, trying to get hold of that person I never could reach during the day.

I zone out at the breakfast table, ordering the subpoints of my sermon more often than I’d like to admit. And when the evening board meeting has gone on past eleven, I’ve stayed at church to work on a manuscript for a book on a “balanced work ethic” until long after midnight.

Upon reflection I’ve discovered two primary reasons I tend to stay busy: I’m not a structured person, and I struggle with selfworth.

Time-Management-Impaired Personality

I’m a creative person who resists structure for structure’s sake. I thrive on breathing room.

Consequently, I find it extremely difficult to concentrate on reading or sermon preparation while sitting at my desk at church. I do better in a corner of a restaurant with a bottomless cup of French roast or behind the steering wheel of my car, parked at a scenic lookout high above the city.

In the same way, I need daily “open space” in my schedule. Half of what I end up doing on a given day I hadn’t planned to do when I got up. The same is true with other things. I’ve tried to confine my sermonizing and creative writing to a three-ring binder. But I end up jotting down ideas on the clipboard suctioned to my windshield or the back of a bulk-mail envelope. For me, the creative winds blow where and when they will, and cannot be channeled into prescribed times or places.

I’ve never been able to get excited about time-management calendars. You know, the ones inviting you to label your daily tasks with an A, B, or C (depending on their importance). Systems with cross-references and index cards leave me feeling as if I’m still learning my preschool ABC‘s. By the time I’ve got all my tasks labeled, I don’t have any energy or time left in the day to get started.

Creative folks like me aren’t always sure which is an A, B, or C task until we start tackling one. Or what initially might appear to be a C is transformed into an A once a few drops of inspiration fall on it. I don’t know how many times I have started using a Daytimer only to give up in frustration several weeks later.

My system is much simpler. I identify the “must-do’s” of my week as well as the “want-to’s” and try not to allow time for the latter until the former are complete. The must-do’s are the obvious: personal nurture, daily family time, sermon preparation, worship planning, staff meetings, mowing my lawn, critical-care calling and vision casting with leadership.

The want-to’s are what my creative spirit longs to do: journaling, article writing, attending the symphony with my wife, sending notes of encouragement to people of my parish, composing worship music, taking my daughters to a baseball game, or playing a round of golf with church newcomers.

In spite of my system’s simplicity, it’s not perfect. I try to do the must-do’s first, but I don’t always succeed. Sometimes the “What if?” winds give lift to my soul, interrupting my intended flight plan. I’ve never taken pilot lessons, but the ability to fly by the seat of my pants came naturally to me.

A brainstorm blows by unannounced about how to communicate imaginatively the church budget. My must-do’s screech to a halt. I stop what I’m doing, run to the copy machine, enlarge a dollar bill to ten times its actual size, and then mount it on cardboard, slicing it into various widths to represent areas of spending.

I suppose it could wait until next week. But why? Birthing an idea gives me thrust and lift sufficient to keep me aloft when I go back to steer my way through the must-do’s. And although I’ve come to accept operating this way, I have to admit it makes my life less efficient, and therefore more busy, than I often like. In other words, my lack of structure has a dark side.

Quite often Saturday morning comes, and I am not finished with my message for Sunday. I drive over to the church and hole up in my office. I start cranking on my outline.

Then out of the corner of my eye, I notice a pink telephone message slip. I decide to return the call. After all, I need a little break. In making the call, I learn that the person’s father died. So next I jot a quick note of sympathy. As I’m about to seal the envelope, I remember that the hymn we will be singing on the morrow speaks to the circumstances of the man’s death. I turn on the copy machine, make a copy of the lyrics, and enclose it with the note.

By that time I realize the organist hasn’t yet received her copy of Sunday’s bulletin. So I drive across town to get it to her. By that time, my daughter’s soccer game has begun. Because I allowed my concentration to be interrupted and substituted a should-do and a want-to for a must-do, I was still working on my sermon after supper instead of playing Uno with the family. When I fail to stay with a priority task, I only end up making more work for myself because the must-do’s must be done sooner or later. And so, busy, busy, busy; do, do, do.

Low Self-Esteem

Charles Hummel says in his popular little booklet, The Tyranny of the Urgent, that our greatest ministry danger is letting the urgent crowd out the most important. What he is describing is the third category that complicates my simple system — the “shoulddo’s.”

The should-do’s are those things others expect the pastor to do. They include hospital calling, visiting in homes, writing visitors, returning phone calls, sitting on standing committees, serving on a denominational task force, teaching a home Bible study, attending the adult-class socials, and playing on the church softball team.

As the word implies, these are activities in which I feel I should be involved. There are always should-do’s shouted in my direction. In the process of adding so many should-do’s to my workweek, however, I end up continually busy, with my emotional tank near empty. In an attempt to catch up, I busy myself to the perishing point. But alas, I never catch up. Only in recent months have I begun to understand why I let others “should” all over me.

Gordon Weekley was a man who worked hard and long as if he had something to prove. He pastored a church of 200 members in Masonboro, North Carolina. Even though it was a stretch, Gordon could make all the hospital visits; he visited in every home; he married, buried, counseled. Gordon never complained about the lousy salary he received. He loved what he did. To him the ministry wasn’t a job. Being a pastor was his life.

In Gordon Weekley’s biography, Balm in Gilead: A Baptist Minister’s Personal Journey Through Drug Addiction, author Don Jeffries recounts “the rest of the story.” A young rising star in his Baptist denomination, Weekley couldn’t lower the rpm’s that raced in his head at night. He would lie in bed, worrying about a parishioner in the hospital, a couple with marital conflicts, or how he could craft his sermon just right.

A doctor friend prescribed a tranquilizer. After a while the nightly pill allowing Gordon restful sleep wasn’t enough. He discovered a diet pill that provided a rush of euphoria during the day. What began rather innocently as a means of sustaining a thriving ministry nearly destroyed his life. He lost his wife, his four sons, his church, his reputation, and even the control of his own mind.

An underlying poor self-image, it appeared, was to blame. A domino effect was set in motion. As the churches Gordon pastored grew, so did his reputation. So did the demands his members placed on him. So did his ego. The more he satisfied their desires, the more he satisfied his own. It becomes obvious to the reader that Gordon was driven as much by his need to be loved as his love of people.

Although not every goal-oriented pastor plummets to the depths of drug addiction, aspects of Gordon Weekley’s story are only too familiar.

For many of us, childhood doubts about our inherent value contaminated the soil of our souls. Subtly taught to fear failure, we were served up conditional love at home, in school, or at church, soon developing a taste for earning acceptance by doing applaudable tasks.

We began to equate busyness with worth. A means of gaining recognition and being affirmed as a person, busyness also has nourished weeds that, in our adult years, now threaten to choke our ministries, marriages, and family life.

In Diane Fassel’s book on workaholism, Working Ourselves to Death, she connects the workaholic’s addiction to low self-esteem: “Because they judge themselves by their accomplishments, they have the illusion they must always be doing something worthwhile in order to feel good about themselves.… [Their] sense of self is not separated from their achievements; rather it actually depends upon achievements. Much of [their] frantic activity is symptomatic, an attempt to suppress or deny low self-esteem.”

I read Fassel’s book in order to review it for a periodical. But as I got into it, I realized I was reading it as much for me as I was for an editor. Much of our busyness — rushing, caring, rescuing — says Fassel, is an attempt to mask the pain associated with the absence of self-worth.

I resonated with those driven by an inner compulsion to perform. It dawned on me that my addiction to achievement and activity had a root system reaching back to innocent days of play, long before I became pastor.

After digesting the book, I grabbed for my journal and, in an attempt to unearth the source of the “shoulds” that control me, started writing. What appeared on paper surprised me:

“I have an instinct deep within that stinks of dead man’s bones. I aim too high. I aim to please. I compulsively control. And in the process push away the ones I love, the things I long for, and the wants God has for me. ‘Dysfunction’ some have called it — a graveyard of my past where my potential birthed by God began to decompose. No longer the sacred ground of being, my life became a cemetery of what might have been. The soil of my survival became the fertile ground of learning how to cope to kill the pain of an impoverished image of my self.”

Digging Up the Roots

Acknowledging the roots of busyness is not sufficient. Action is required. But where to begin?

Sharpening my priorities is not as easy as some gurus of time management imply. For me it will be a challenge every week for the rest of my life. But I am beginning to make peace with the fact that I need not be doing everything I am capable of doing well.

I have also sought help to detoxify my work addiction through therapy. A few months with a Christian counselor improved my “hindsight.” He enabled me to see how my neurotic need for approval has dogged me for forty years. My exhausting busyness is an attempt to validate my competency, much like when I held up my kindergarten artwork in front of my parents for their approval. My counselor gave me skills to focus on my own worth and abilities.

Although I have benefited from counseling, the pursuit of self-discipline has been the most logical and painless place for me to begin.

Irwin Hansen, the ceo of Porter Memorial Hospital in Denver, has gained a reputation for turning around medical centers losing money. He has identified “lack of discipline” as culprit number one. Although generating a lot of activity, many hospital employees fail to get their jobs done. His remedy is simple: “All you need is a big pot of glue. You smear some on your chair and some on the seat of your pants. You sit down and you stick with every project until you’ve done the best you can.”

I’ve had trouble finding my glue jar underneath the to-do piles. But I am making steady progress, structuring for a more disciplined routine. I am attempting, for example, to handle a sheet of paper only once (scanning it, filing it, responding to it, handing it to someone else, or throwing it away) rather than allowing it to join other homeless memos on my cluttered desk.

I’m also finding it helpful to jot down what I need to do on a given day before I get to the office. And by having a typed outline of my message ready for the bulletin (printed on Friday), my sermon is two-thirds done by Saturday morning — so I’m less apt to be sequestered from my family all day Saturday. And as I mentioned in this chapter’s opening paragraph, I have voluntarily limited my nights out each week to three.

The practice of self-control is helping me obey the detour sign on my desk. The sign points in the direction of home. I keep it in view to remind me that the “road work” of ministry is never done, but the years of my influence in the lives of three little girls is limited. That little wooden sign calls me to be disciplined in the office so I can leave the office at the office when I go home. Consequently, I’m doing a better job finishing my must-do’s. I’m also becoming more aware of what is, in reality, unnecessary. I’m learning a foreign language — the language of saying no.

Most critically, as I discipline myself to reflect on the Scriptures (not for a sermon outline but for my own nurture), I am increasingly exposed to a God who affirms me unconditionally as a human being, not a human doing.

Once again my journal records my hopeful progress:

“Thistles and weeds, seeds I never planted have overtaken my life. I trip. I stumble. I fall flat on my face. But in ‘the fall,’ I find the guts and grace to get up and walk out of my overgrown graveyard one step at a time.”

I am resisting the lie that more work will make me a better person. I am also better able to say “Forget it!” to the should-do’s and stick with the must-do’s and want-to’s. My dependence on other’s expectations is slowly being replaced by an increased dependence on what God wants for me.

According to Charles Hummel, this dependence on the Father’s agenda is what allowed Jesus always to have time for people and yet never appear stressed: “Jesus’ prayerful waiting for God’s instructions freed him from the tyranny of the urgent. It gave him a sense of direction, set a steady pace, and enabled him to do every task God assigned. And on the last night he could say, ‘I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.’ “