MIGHT WE STOP THE INSANITY?

(As a side-note, thank you for checking in on occasion. You cleared the 400,000 hit mark yesterday.)

Mindless and empty chatter coupled with endless church activities are blurring the kingdom to those most engaged. We must be cautious. Is it just my age of 64 or does it seem so for you, too, that weeks now go by as rapidly as days once did?

Slow down. Even stop. Stop the insanity of borrowing, rushing, worrying, pushing, and pulling.

Stop it.

As a friend, Chuck Swindoll has handed me wise and valuable insights over the past 25 years. He wrote for all of us to view, An inner restlessness grows within us when we refuse to get alone and examine our own hearts, including our motives. As our lives begin to pick up the debris that accompanies a lot of activities and involvements, we can train ourselves to go right on, to stay active, to be busy in the Lord's work. Unless we discipline ourselves to pull back, to get alone for the hard work of self-examination in times of solitude, serenity will remain only a distant dream. How busy we can become...and as a result, how empty! We mouth words, but they mean nothing. We find ourselves trafficking in unlived truths. We fake spirituality.

The sin of surface living goes unreported, undetected, and therefore, unaccounted. That's just the way life goes; too busy to hardly notice that we have become more robotic by simply reacting to bossing schedules than noting the wonder in the stillness of His presence.

It may go that way; but it only does so with our permission. I had no more landed upon the work in Tulsa in 1977 when I soon landed in the hospital with hyper-thyroidism. Exhaustion doesn't begin to describe the frustration of it all.

I had a week to think about life in that stark white and lonely room on the fourth floor. Then I had another seven weeks home confinement; of not being permitted to preach or carry on work responsibilities.

I looked out of my dining room windows to the church parking lot three times a week...and wept. I so wanted to be right in the middle of things. I ached to get to be in the hub-bubishness of us!

I went to school during those long days. By that, I mean I studied such a predicament as I had much, much time to think. That's when I created my own term of taking a class called Suffering 101. Oh how I needed such a course. What I learned in those two months has fed me for the next 30-some years. I learned God runs the ship; not Terry Rush.

What an outstanding thought!

Might it be true of you as well? You live as if every meeting will fail if you aren't in on it? Your calendar says you are behind as soon as you open your morning eyes? Your voicemail, the email, and your snail mail indicate you are much more behinder than you had assumed?

Might we slow down? Might we begin today....to stop the insanity?