Perhaps you noticed that it’s been a while since our last Behind the Scene newsletter. Perhaps you haven’t noticed but you had this nagging feeling that something was missing in your life, but you couldn’t put your finger on what it was. I would like to say that I have been intentionally withholding the BTS so that in its absence your heart would grow fonder, but I’m not that calculated. Any excitement you experience from seeing this in your inbox is probably happenstance. The truth is that between getting ready for Kids Bash and juggling the rest of church life I’ve discovered that the things deemed “urgent” always seem to climb their way to the top of the to-do list, pushing the seemingly less urgent to “tomorrow,” and in the words of some country singer, “tomorrow never comes.” Such has been the fate of our beloved BTS over these past few months.
Now don’t get me wrong, prioritizing is important. If I showed up on a Sunday unprepared but I spent two days writing a zinger of an article for the BTS, most would agree that I allocated my time poorly. The key to prioritizing is knowing how to differentiate between things that are truly important and things that have a false sense of importance because they just have to get done. Remember, less urgent does not necessarily mean less important. Oftentimes the less urgent things are the most important. Ask any kid what he or she wants more—parents who work lots of hours so their kids can have more things or parents available to play catch in the front yard—and you’ll see how important less urgent things can be.
When life is run by the urgent the line between what is truly significant and what is less important tends to blur and we spend our time moving from one task to the next, leaving critically important, but seemingly less urgent jobs for tomorrow— over… and over… and over again. This is called the “tyranny of urgency,” and the only way to escape the tyrannical rule of the urgent is to stop. Stopping is the only way to see the importance of the un-urgent, and until we stop we will never be able to prioritize life’s demands appropriately. Furthermore, stopping not only helps us to see this, but it creates the space for those things that are not urgent but essential to life: like playing ball with your child, going on a date with your spouse, grabbing a cup of coffee with a friend, worshiping God with others at church, taking a much needed nap.
Evidently God knows our propensity to be ruled by the urgent; this is one of the reasons he commands us to stop once a week and honor the Sabbath. God says to stop once a week and put the seemingly un-urgent at the top of our to-do list, to enjoy Him and those he put around us as if they are the only things that really matter. When we do this, we’ll notice that our stopping doesn’t bring the world crashing down around us. Instead, it brings peace to the other six days of our world … not only peace, but also freedom from the tyranny of the urgent.
Just a thought,
Jason