“I rarely go to bed on the same day I woke up.”
“My days are more filled up than they are freed out.”
“I am almost always exhausted!”
If you can relate with any of the above statements, just as I do, then this post is for you...
In the recent few years, so much has been happening in my life. So much so that I cannot not hold it all together to show you just how much. I tend to be more and more involved in tight schedules and random activities. My to-do-list is always overflowing, always over-flooded with things to be done. I am striving to become better at so many things in so little a time. I want to be here. I want to be there. I want to be in so many places touching so many lives in so little time. I am needed here. I am needed there. I am needed in so many places all at the same time. I am always dividing myself into little pieces of myself in order to meet various demands at varied times. I am always diving into deeper waters of service. My life is always on the run. I am in urgent need of a slow down.
Life is in a rush today. A very big rush. I have not met many people who don't rush through life today. Not even my own self manages doing that quite well. People are becoming less creative, less intuitive, less thoughtful but more noisy and more presumptive. Everything seems to be in a waterfall: studies, service to people (both work and church), family, friends... Everything is a waterfall. Everything demands for our attention:
Drivers are driving faster. Preachers are preaching quicker, and their messages are becoming shorter. Young people need things done kinda yesterday. Twitter is faster, more definite, precise and more to the point than ever before. Facebook is crazier, bumper and more spontaneous today than it was 5 years ago. WhatsApp is crazier, nastier and catchier. More and more relationships are budding from social networks than they are in real life. Divorces are on the rise due to lost hope - married partners are losing trust in each other at a rapid speed than you can ever imagine. Trust is like the wind - swings and sways without ever settling. People are preferring get-quick-get-out paradigms to anything that demands commitment (no wonder so many relationships are falling apart, and if they DO exist, they are only but ghost relationships...). People want quick things and they don’t care that these things attained in a rush will disappear just as fast as they came...
Christians want to deal with their God in the same way: more demanding, more impulsive and edgier than ever before. I am not talking about charisma because charisma can be good; I am talking about ambition, because ambition is always dangerous. THE WORD OF FAITH DOCTRINE is on the rise. And it is sweeping all of us away. All of us. True story. (Get time to read about THE WORD-FAITH DOCTRINE/MOVEMENT here.) More and more Christians now believe that they can literally “manufacture” their own blessings so long as they do a few predetermined things or follow a certain predetermined way of doing things - and always minus obedience or adherence to the Word of God. We are believing more in the lie that we don’t need God to make things work. We are having puppetry for Christianity: a people who believe in (and are mostly controlled by) systems than they are controlled by the Word of God. (I bet you have heard that somewhere in Matthew 15:9, right?)
Life is in a rush - a very unhealthy rush. And we need to redirect traffic and stop life from rushing this fast and ending us all in a place called nowhere. We need to stop life before we lose our friendships that have been nurtured over time, before we lose our health (both spiritually, physically and morally), before we throw away our relationships due to emotional drain and/or absence, before we lose our God and our faith; and before we get burnt out or ultimately depressed. We need to slow down.
But how do we slow down in this internet age where everything is in a rush?
Somewhere at the beginning of this week, Mashable.com had an article titled “How to Spend Only 10 Minutes Per Day on Twitter”. It didn't help us at all (we twitter addicts). (Oh I just had to confess that!) It is because it suggests the very things we avoid to do: creating lists and streamable #hashtags. We hate that. So we won’t be doing it. Not anytime soon.
But after running over a few possibilities about the best way to slow down, I created a list that I think may help. Read it below and consider yourself helped:-
- Learn to say “no!” Yes, I am writing this in bold red so that you get it. Saying ‘no’ does not mean that you are narcissistic, or that you are mean, but that you know when your limits are catching up, and that you can never be God: you can’t satisfy everyone at all times by doing everything they "need" you to do! You will burn out and nobody will care. Yeah dearie, nobody will care. So why not take care of your body by simply saying ‘No! Not now.’ That is why people take sabbaticals.
- If you are a leader, learn to delegate duties. There are people around you that can perform that task just as well as you can. Please allow them to trim their expertise. Step in an mentor someone to take over you. Leave a permanent legacy in your area of specialization.
- Learn to know that time is no one’s possession. You can’t control time, but you can master it. Use this knowledge to your advantage.
- Pray that you don’t get carried away by the cloggy unimportant stuff you meet in the course of every day you spend. It is the devil’s trap to make you depressed and discontented all the time. Take time and have your devotions. Read your Bible. Pray. Don’t just skim through the Bible and mutter/stutter words and call them prayer, no. Become intimate with God. Meditate on what you read. Seek to know Him. Make Jesus your friend and the Holy Spirit your daily guide. Spiritual strength is able to muster enough strength to keep you going for days. So the more you make it a habit, the more refined you will be on a daily basis!
- Schedule your to-do-list. Have priorities. Learn to work on one thing at a time, starting with the 2 minutes activities, then the 10 minutes tasks, then the 30 minutes ones, and so forth and so on. Don’t postpone a call or a text message unless it is sooooo necessary for you to do so. Smartphones can help you work around this. Get an SMS app that schedules texts and a Contacts app that persistently pops up a notification to remind you to call someone. Log out of WhatsApp or any other IM service you are using; or to save yourself from "IM starvation" (it is some sort of modern malnutrition), respond to a few WhatsApps then mark yourself “away” - that is if WhatsApp has such a thing (I have never used it, so I have no idea if it has such stuff)... As for me, I cannot stand unanswered pings and messages on WhatsApp, so I refused to join.
- Schedule your Email, Twitter and/or Facebook updates/respond times so that you only appear on social media at certain times of the day and not all the time... (This is actually for me.) Or again, blot out all the unnecessary pings from those many apps you have on your phone or laptop. Uninstall them. (I just did that to some today! :-) Hah!)
- Do what you can today. Leave the rest for tomorrow. It is that simple. Not all things fit in one day. But don't again fall trap to worshiping a god called procrastination. No, don't.
- Have a time off. Chill. Relax your brain. Go out for a walk. Take out someone for a meal. Watch a movie. Play a game. Read a book. Listen to music. Laugh. Go for a holiday. Exercise. Join a gym club - or just do your gym thang. Make yoursefl happy. That is what the money you are running after is for, right? Just do something that calms you down - something that pulls you away from the world and unto yourself.
- Take at least ten minutes daily to reflect on how the day was without worrying about the bad parts. Please remember to congratulate yourself for the good parts. During this time, put off your phone, shut down your laptop, the internet and that TV... Just allow your mind to go on recess - unoccupied and “breathing.” This will put you back on track.
- Start working on the above points - one at a time until you feel slowed down.
Good luck with that.
Bonface Morris.
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