Peace Through Accepting Truth

One way to help with feeling more at peace and not overwhelmed by the busyness of life is to practice and grow in the wisdom of being humble and honest about limitations. There are countless opportunities and possibilities in life, but it's wise to keep in mind that limitations exist for every person. Every one has limits in hours available, physical and emotional energy, and money, whether or not they're honest enough to admit it.

That's what the Bible means by humility. It's realizing and admitting the truth about ourselves in order to respond appropriately and well and to be healthy, because we then see what we need to make the right choices.

One example is how many people approach friendships. They try to be close friends with everyone and in the end feel like they aren't friends with anyone. The reason is that with the amount of hours that person has, they really can't invest deeply into 15 people. Both that person and each "friend" are affected by desiring a close friendship but feeling like something isn't connecting, wondering why the friendship isn't getting deeper or knowing that the friend just doesn't have enough time for them.

It'd be much wiser for the person to acknowledge the truth of the amount of time and energy available, and that most likely will mean that only a small amount or even one person can be invested with quality time, while still meeting the many other responsibilities they have in life.

Another example would just be a very long day's to-do list of activities or tasks. It may be too long and a person may feel too overwhelmed because they aren't able or are stressing out about finishing everything, but they haven't really practiced discernment in thinking through how much really can be accomplished.

It may be hard to be humble enough to discern this because many people act like (pretend) they have an endless amount of energy and time. Also, each person has different amounts of time and energy depending on their giftings and life situation. So if a person is comparing themselves with others and not keeping that in mind, it might cause them to feel discouraged or set unrealistic expectations for themselves.

4 Reasons to Slow Down in a Busy World

It feels like there are endless possibilities we can do each day: Friends to talk to, places to go, things to read, work to be done, and games to play. The Internet alone has what feels like an endless number of webpages with a variety of content: videos, images, drawings, and words.

The result of this causes many people to spend seconds here and there and not really truly focus much on anything. You may have had a conversation with someone that when it started you sort of knew the person was already thinking about the next thing they wanted to do and any moment would break away to it. In order to do it all, that person felt like that was needed.

There are a number of reasons to try to slow down in this world—to pick a small amount of things to do in what seems like a sea of possibilities. Before I get into the reasons, I want to mention a possible cause that might help: Pride is sneaky, and it may take the form of thinking that we can do everything. A big problem in thinking we can, or even should, do everything is that we feel awful because we end up not being able to. The reason is we can't humanly do everything, but pride tries not to show us that.

Here are the reasons to slow down. Slowing down will help the following happen:

1. Relationships. The example I mentioned above shows the issue with going too fast or being too busy doing everything. There's no way to truly get to know and have deep relationships with people if we are always running to the next thing without taking as much time as is needed or it takes to finish a full, good conversation. Of course, along with relationships with people, this principle applies to our relationship with God too.

2. Enjoyment in God's creation/gifts to us. When we have time to focus on things, we see the beauty and beautiful complexity of things. Like simply taking a walk through a forest preserve.

3. Thinking and reflecting. With so much information everywhere, if we never take time to think and reflect on it, we'll never be able to truly process it all and think through what we think about it. We need to be careful and think through how what we do and what we've read all relates to our faith and what matters. Otherwise we might be running around doing things that aren't really worthwhile.

4. Creativity. When we allow more space and time in our schedule we might come up with interesting ideas and things to create and do that we wouldn't have otherwise.

God's Will

A few times in scripture God is mentioned of speaking in a still small voice or a whisper. I find that for modern Christian's the way God speaks to us is often very "non obvious."

It's not that God does not wish to communicate to his people, but he wants them to have interest in listening. A lot of people talk about not being able to know God's will. And often we will have no idea of God's will and there is nothing wrong with that.

The interesting thing however is that we often fail to know God's will because we often fail to ever allow quiet in our lives. When we are rushing to accomplish 7 tasks in the next hour we are almost never going to notice the will of God if God is in fact trying to communicate with us.

Busyness is hard to avoid, but there must also be times where we have quiet for thought and reflection. Sometimes we cannot find direction in life simply because we are in ceaseless activity which prevents us from finding direction.