This is how you lose your soul

It was August. 

We had left our beach vacation after a mere 36 hours into it due to a hurricane headed straight for our condo. 

The husband was starting a new business, and he decided that since we were home, there was work he really needed to get done.

So the kids and I hung out at the house. For nearly a week.

We had fun, but we were a little out of sorts. Not bored, but just sort of stir crazy.

I'm glad now looking back that we rested for a bit.

Mainly because a hurricane of a different kind was brewing, and it was headed straight for us.

Busyness. 

The insane sort of busyness that slowly bleeds your soul dry.

And I was unprepared for it. 

I remember us leaving our first flag football practice and seeing one of the dads running across the parking lot, two small boys in tow. He was yelling over his shoulder, "We have to hurry! We have another practice across town and we're late...!"

We got into our van and inched our way out of the parking lot with all of the other families that had come to a sport practice of one kind or another and finally merged onto the main road clogged with weary commuters trying to slowly make their way home, and as we barely creeped down the road I thought, 

This is how we lose our souls...

We are so busy. We are so busy we don't think or feel or breathe. We just keep spinning constantly every day until we collapse into bed way too late at night so that we can get up way too early the next morning so that we can do it all again.

And then we die.

Really.

This entire life of ours spins and spins and then it's over. 

And it made me sick inside. And a little panicky.

I whined to the husband, and he said, "You got boys. They play sports."

Well, okay.

I mean, I understand that. 

I guess. I mean, I wanted them to have a fun thing to do. They spend all their time with me, and I really thought them having something fun to do outside the house would be... fun.

I don't think I really thought it through all the way. 

I narrowed my eyes at the husband and said, "I have spent the last 5 out of 7 days/nights in some way doing something with flag football. That is not okay with me."

It felt good just to whine about it.

The girl kid was also doing an extra voice clinic. That meant that the only night that we weren't busy during the week was Tuesday. That night quickly filled up too. Saturday mornings were now dedicated to football games, so that meant there wasn't a morning where we weren't up and at them early. 

I felt like I was going a little crazy.

And the whole world is like this. Everyone I knew was like this. When you greet someone and you say, "How are you?" they would respond, "We are so busy!"

And now I found myself saying this too.

Why?

One thing the Lord was clearly showing me here was that I needed to get out of my house. I need to be around people. I need to interact with people other than those in my own tiny little world.

I got that.

And it was nice. To meet new people and be around different folks. 

Okay.

And I realized that I cannot be at home all the time. 

I got that.

But how do I be this busy and not lose myself?

And getting this busy made me feel disconnected from God. 

I really, really hated that.

And then I hated even more when I started feeling okay about being that disconnected from God.

That made me really panicky.

I hated having one eye on the clock in the morning when I was spending time with Him. I hated knowing that I had only a certain amount of time and then I had to move on. I hated feeling the clock ticking all the time.

I hated how I felt: scattered and tired and emotional and in the middle of a giant mess.

The up side was that I didn't have time to think. 

I see why people get this busy. It's sort of like being drunk. You're numb and like a robot. 

Nothing real happens. 

We anesthetize ourselves so we don't have to deal with what's going on inside of ourselves.

And by "we," I mean "me."

And I think we use our kids to do that, for the most part. There's plenty for them to do, and you can literally spend all of your time shuffling them from one thing to another. 

I ended up this way, and it was quite by accident.

I kept wondering, "Why? Why do we do this?"

To avoid the realities of life? To avoid what's deep inside of us? Because life didn't turn out the way we had hoped it would so we pour everything into our kids and into making our lives busy so we don't have to think about what could/should have been? 

It's hard to think these things at the YMCA when your kids are happily at flag football practice. 

You feel sort of abnormal.

Maybe I'm over thinking it all. Maybe we can just be happily super busy and have deeply committed, active, intimate relationships with our Savior. Maybe this is just a joyously happy busy season of life, and when the kids are gone we settle back into a slower paced existence with our spouses, content to just be alone with them moving slowly through life for a change. Maybe we are allowing God to do a work deeply in our hearts and spirits more than I think we are, and there is fruit later from this season of life, and we will reap in joyous plentitude all that we are sowing in our lives now.

And by "we," I mean "me."

I'm reading a book on prayer, and this quote jumped out at me this morning:

Many Christians give in to a quiet cynicism that leaves us unknowingly paralyzed. We see the world as monolithic, frozen. To ask God for change confronts us with our doubt about whether prayer makes any difference. Is change even possible? Doesn't God control everything? If so, what's the point? Because it's uncomfortable to feel our unbelief, to come face-to-face with our cynicism, we dull our souls with the narcotic of activity.

It's easier to be busy than to think.

I get that. 

I also worry that when I'm this busy that there is the potential for me to mess it all up. I'm too tired to be kind to my husband. I'm too busy to listen to the depths of my daughter's heart. I'm too distracted to teach my sons how to be men of God. The house certainly isn't clean and we aren't eating healthy food and I'm bossy and nagging and weepy and angry and stressed and not good for a lot of anything positive, much less eternal.

Then our first sermon from a sermon series on prayer happened. 

I sort of knew that it was going to kick my butt. The Lord was gracious enough to have prepared me for that beforehand. I knew it was coming.

Luke 17 ~

And just as it happened in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of Man: 

they were eating, they were drinking, they were marrying, they were being given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all.

It was the same as happened in the days of Lot: 

they were eating, they were drinking, they were buying, they were selling, they were planting, they were building; 

but on the day that Lot went out from Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all.

I think mine would look like

she was cooking and baking and eating, and schooling and doing laundry and cleaning, and teaching and reading writing and running and trying to lose those exasperating 15 pounds, and dying gray hair and laughing and watching zombie television shows and doing lots of good in Your name and texting and listening and sharing and studying and talking and...

then she died.

(The Bible doesn't point out all the evil that society was doing during these times. Just the happy, normal business of life.)

So maybe that's not so bad. Maybe that's what we all want. Have a good education, get a family, and nice house, enough money to go to WalMart when you need to, go out to eat, take a vacation and be nice.

Don't get too wild and crazy. Don't talk about the Bible too much. Don't get all weird and make people feel uncomfortable. Most definitely don't ruffle any feathers. Just be nice, normal and go with the flow. Be ordinary. 

Then you die and stand before Christ, and you and He can hash it all out. There's grace, right? He understands. He understands that I had a house to clean and kids to get to football practice. 

I'm sure of it. He understands. 

He just wants us to be happy.

This is what my busy soul thinks, anyway.