For a long time now I have had a number of good intentions. Top of the list would be spending meaningful time with God on a daily basis. Another one is really investing into people and relationships. What I have found though is that my days are busy, and that these busy days turn into busy weeks, the months disappear, and my good intentions have stayed just that. When I speak to my friends and my family I hear something similar, and so I know the struggle with busyness is something many of us can relate to.

I guess the thing that has grown to trouble me about busyness is that if I can look back over the last years of my life and see that it has always been this way, then my life is actually being defined by it. I don’t like this thought at all because I would hate to get to the end of my life and see that I actually missed what I understand as most important - being with God and meaningful relationships.

I have always thought that busyness was just something that plagued our culture and not something that we can easily get around – we have homes to run, jobs, mortgages and commutes, small children and elderly family to care for, we have ministry and church commitments, and not to mention time with our spouse and even getting to the gym!

Sometimes I have sat with a coffee and written lists and plans of how I might fit everything in – all good and important stuff – but for some reason I have gone away feeling kind of overwhelmed and unsettled.

So I started to seek God about it, and am still in the process of trying to understand how He might view this. I truly struggle to reconcile such consuming busyness with His design for our lives. The most incredible thing has started to happen where God has started to lay bare a lot of the assumptions that underpin my goals and plans and activities, as ‘good’ and even necessary as they may be. At the same time He has started to reveal passages of Scripture that have never seemed to ‘sink in’ as they do now and I am questioning a lot. Perhaps some time off in the future, God will open an opportunity to write more about this.

One thing I am learning though is that God’s design for life is seasonal. There is a real sense of release that comes from the knowledge that maybe God only asks us to focus on one or two of the roles we have at a time, rather than on the five we take on. Sometimes the Proverbs 31 woman is held up as the ideal of the woman who does it all, but does this beautiful woman do it all at the same time?

Ecclesiastes 3:1 offers a lot of peace in this sense,

To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven.