You know...sometimes things that we think are vitally important are simply placed in a position of importance due to their urgency. This semester, I have had the joy of working through a great discipleship/bible study with a group of friends and this week, our scripture reading has been supplemented with a short passage by Charles Hummel. In the Tyranny of the Urgent, he discusses how we often get distracted by tasks that are driven by a sense of urgency; often at the expense of things that are truly important.
Most of the piece is focused on priorities. That is, as followers of Christ one of our ultimate priorities should be to fulfill the Great Commission. So we establish routines and checklists to help us do this. We schedule meetings, we plan events, we set deadlines, and we establish rules. And then we name it. We call it ministry.
Hummel makes an interesting distinction between things of urgency and importance. He uses Christ's ministry as our example (probably a good choice) and points out that there were many times when Jesus didn't do what his disciples urged him to do. He stayed put when his friend Lazarus was ill. But every single time...God was glorified. It certainly didn't happen the way the schedule dictated. It definitely did not happen in way we would have liked. Lazarus DIED. Why didn't Jesus drop everything and rush to be with his friend? People around him said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying?”(John 11:37 ESV). But God was glorified through this...Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. Jesus' purpose and mission was fulfilled, even though there were people who were disappointed by His actions.
It seems like we make things into life and death situations. We fear the consequences of not living up to expectations, of not meeting the deadlines...but once the time passes, the pressures seem like whispers. God's Grace is not about performance. It's not about scheduling more meetings, events, or deadlines. We place our identity in the role we're playing, the job we've been given, the bills we need to pay, our achievements, our family. So many distractions. So many tasks. We lose sight that our identity is in Christ.
Don't get me wrong...there is a fine line, a slippery slope, even, that can lead us into a fight against the tyranny of the urgent only to replace it with a dictatorship of laziness and untrustworthiness. We must avoid complacency or becoming undependable. But it seems to me that much of our daily life is consumed with meeting these unending deadlines that we force the truly important things out of our schedule.
This is definitely an area where I have struggled recently; I have fallen under the tyranny of the urgent. I have set aside important things because of these imposed deadlines. I have sacrificed devotional time and prayer time because I have to plan classes. I have ignored opportunities to have discussions with students because I had emails to compose. I have spent time planning events rather than spending time discipling students.
James writes that a faith without works is a dead faith...there is a scary tendency for us to attempt to force the production of fruit. We allow the Holy Spirit to instigate, but then we try to take over from there. We should instead pray that the Holy Spirit would enable us to do good works. The good works should flow through us as a response to the Grace given to us. Not as an attempt to show worthiness. And this is my prayer; that we will accept Grace as it is...and not try to warp it into something that we can be worthy of.
Comments
Post a Comment