Better to let your words be few and your work abundant
From the title, you probably are pretty sure you know where this column is headed. A Christian minister is bringing up staying busy, so he is almost assuredly going to warn us all about the dangers of being too busy, right? He will tell us that we can get so busy that we lose our walk with the Lord for whom we work. He will tell us to slow down and spend more time in contemplation and rest. He will likely remind us of Mary and Martha and implore us to be more like Mary.
And if you think that, then this particular column is going to send you into a bit of a tailspin.
As I sit down to write this column, I am coming off of a 96-hour workweek and going into what will likely be a 70-plus-hour workweek. Last week was our church teen camp. Three other churches joined in with us, and we spent a week with our youth in the lovely North Carolina mountains. I had already worked 11 hours on Sunday to start the week, and then I spent Monday through Friday running the youth camp. This entailed being up at 6:30 every morning, not going to bed until somewhere around midnight and very rarely not being in the middle of everything that was happening. To make matters even more interesting, there was a slow and steady rain the entire week, which meant that I was soaking wet by 7 a.m. each day as I set up the morning challenges. Mind you, kids don’t mind playing in the rain, but this adult would have rather been on a sunny beach or under warm, dry covers.
When we got home early Friday afternoon, I immediately unpacked and repacked, met some of my men from the church and took them to Charlottesville, Virginia, where I preached at a men’s conference. By the time I got home late Saturday night, I was pretty spent. Then came another 11-hour Sunday, complete with an awards banquet for our youth group for their work during the recently completed program year.
This week, I will work at the church all day, then drive to Pacolet, South Carolina, three separate nights to preach a family Vacation Bible School. And all the while, we will be preparing for a 3,000-person outreach on July 4th and then another youth camp that I will preach in Rochelle, Virginia, immediately after that.
I am busy. Very busy.
It is entirely true that a person can become like Martha and be, as Jesus put it, “cumbered about much serving” and “troubled about many things.” But, as with every coin, there is another side to consider.
Ecclesiastes 5:2-3 says, “Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be hasty to utter any thing before God: for God is in heaven, and thou upon Earth: therefore let thy words be few. For a dream cometh through the multitude [abundance] of business; and a fool’s voice is known by multitude of words.”
The context of these verses clearly shows us a contrast between words and work. We are to let our words be few and our work be abundant. And, contrary to what many old commentators say, the dream spoken of here is not the weird dreams of the night, but the waking dreams of the day, the things we want that can only be accomplished by the multitude of business, or as we may put it, “busyness.”
Proverbs 10:4 puts it this way, “He becometh poor that dealeth with a slack hand: but the hand of the diligent maketh rich.” Proverbs 22:29 says, “Seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings; he shall not stand before mean [obscure, insignificant] men.” In simple terms, these verses place the responsibility for what we have and what we become on our own shoulders. And this is true in the ministry, and in plumbing, and in factory work, and as an entrepreneur — it is true in pretty much everything. Put another way, God has no intention of ever blessing laziness.
I am quite sure that there are some Marthas out there who serve too much, some Martys who minister too much and some Marvins who plow too much. Such people should indeed pare the schedule down and reorganize in such a way that neither personal time with Christ nor pleasant time with family is neglected. I am also sure I have sometimes been guilty of that very thing. But I am also quite certain that the American tendency of the day, be it in secular work or sacred, tends far more toward slackness than diligence.
In ministry, I am far too often bewildered by men who are too lazy to truly study and knock on doors and labor on facilities and yet somehow expect to simply hang a sign on a storefront building, shout really loud and expect to suddenly have a large, thriving church. In secular life, I am far too often equally bewildered by people who fear things like blisters, splinters, 40-plus-hour workweeks and budgets, and yet somehow expect to immediately have what their parents took 40 years to accumulate.
Busy has somehow gotten a pretty bad rap in our day; it has become the mugshot of character traits. But busy is still how big things get done. In 1 Corinthians 15:10, Paul said, “I labored more abundantly than they all,” and he did. And because of that, he arguably had a greater impact on humanity than anyone in history except for Christ himself.
Don’t look down on “busy.”