Everyone I know is exhausted. It’s the Everything Everywhere All At Once phenomenon.
Because we can enter a meeting from our homes, I think we say yes to far more things than we used to. And, each of those “things” has consequences. They create to-do lists. There are relationships to build, concepts to explore, ideas to pursue, and always more meetings to continue what’s sure to be good work. But, it’s good work added on to the other good work from the other meetings and it doesn’t take long to feel like hiding is the only option.
These commitments create a world that is only inch deep, but mile wide. We spread ourselves so thinly we can’t go deep with anyone; we feel disconnected and even unrooted while we’re inundated with people. I see this in myself often. Maybe you see it in yourself too.
Busyness is seductive. Important people are busy. People who have people are busy. People who matter, who are needed and wanted, those are the busy people. We respect busyness and the people who embody it. Therefore, if I’m busy, I’m important and I matter and people love me. “Thank you for the invitation for letting me be one of the Busy People.”
If there’s going to be a revolution, a liberation, a new world born, we’re going to need to live lives more than inch deep, though. We’re going to need to resist the allure of ego and allow ourselves to be seduced instead by a vision of mile deep relationships. It a practice of letting lunch with a friend go on so long you’re ready for dinner, of arriving early and staying late for book group rather than racing to get there and hurrying out to get to the next thing, of visiting with an elderly aunt for no reason at all.
I’m coming to understand that Disrupting Church is also Disrupting Life, Disrupting the status quo, the mindlessness of doing what we’ve always done and hoping something will change. Renewed churches are embodied by rooted people in deep relationship with each other and Earth. The very first thing to bring our churches into the new age, once we’ve decided we want to do that, is to breathe deeply and move slowly.
Ron Chisholm of the People’s Institute once said it so well: “We must go slowly. Time is running out.”