on 3 May 2022
Dear all at IPC,
I recently started writing lists again, the kind of thing to plan my days and weeks. I found it helpful to think through what I needed to do and as we all know, it is enormously satisfying when you tick off what you’ve achieved.
I noticed however that there were times when I was adding to my list things that were just meetings I had to attend. It was ridiculous, like attending elders meetings or staff meetings. They weren’t tasks to be done or things I was likely to forget, but it made my list look longer and enabled me to tick more things off. It was as if I wanted to convince myself how busy I was. No one else reads my lists each day. It is not as if I publish them
Planning is a good thing and my temperament is to play things off the cuff. But now life is sufficiently complicated I need to think how to spend my time as productively as possible. All of that makes sense but why did I start putting completely unnecessary things on my list? Added to that, I found that the lists were getting longer and longer and more unrealistic. I’d spend a fair bit of time transferring yesterday’s list to today’s list!
I’m sure someone could do all sorts of analysis on the above and could make a strong case that I needed help of one kind or another, perhaps on getting my priorities sorted for starters. But how did something that I originally began so it would help me, become an exercise of tyranny?
We live in a culture that likes others to think of us as busy, productive, maximising the time we have. We are terrified of people thinking we’re lazy or that we are missing out on life.
On the tyranny of lists, it’s the familiar theme of recognising that good tools can become bad masters. Planning is good and yet our capacity for self deception is remarkable. There are days when we will fail miserably at ticking off our lists: but we need to remember, we are no more or less justified before God. Hold your lists lightly!
One other aspect of ever increasing lists is accepting limitations. We are finite beings with a finite amount of time and finite resources. We need to accept our creaturehood. God is infinite and eternal and unchangeable but we are not, and no matter how much we try, will never be.
The constant desire to do more, achieve more, be more productive, has a good side in that we are to fulfil the creation mandate of filling the earth and subduing it. There is also a very dark side to those desires, where we refuse to accept that we have limitations. It is a refusal to accept who we are and that we have been created. We cannot do everything we want to do and that’s ok: we are not God.
Sadly the cycle of busyness can hide the fact that we don’t like who we are, and our busyness can conceal that. We can often see that in others but not so clearly in ourselves.
Perhaps our busy lists point to the fact we have not fully grasped the gospel of Jesus Christ that brings peace and rest, a willingness to let go of our striving. I’m not sure that the Lord Jesus had lists. He certainly lived his earthly life with a clear sense of purpose and priorities, and yet we see him consistently meeting people unexpectedly. As you read the gospels, he does not live at a rushed pace.
He is a man at ease with himself. He doesn’t live with the tyranny of a to do list hanging over him. He takes time to rest.
As we understand what it is that Jesus has done in uniting us to himself, it brings an acceptance of our creaturehood and an understanding that we are dearly loved children despite our performance or the amount we have ticked off our list.
There is in each one of us a need to feel important but we need to recognise we are already important, list or no list. That importance is not found in our accomplishments, but in that God has poured his grace out upon us. Our identity is bound up with Jesus Christ and not our list.
Hold lightly to your lists! Your Minister and friend,
Paul