There is a quote I
ran across a couple of years ago that still sticks in my brain.
"There is nothing so
useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all"
At times in my life
there has never been a truer statement.
Works I immersed myself into that were not worthwhile. Projects I broke my neck to do that had no
real payoff. Tasks I was assigned and
dedicated to that were pointless. The jobs that are nothing more than the “busy
work” of life. I look back at the time
and energy and effort I put into them and wonder what was I thinking.
But that is the
point, I wasn’t. When you get busy on the task, your mind has a way of drowning
out the why question for the buzz of activity. You think only about how you are going to do it, and the what comes next, rather than if it
needs to be done in the first place.
It is similar to the
effect known as Inattentional blindness.
Inattentional blindness is the failure to notice an unexpected stimulus
that is in one's field of vision when other attention-demanding tasks
If he can’t
cause you to be unfaithful, he will at least make you unproductive. He will
create busy work that keeps you from truly important things. An
inventor invented a machine that had lights, bells, whistles, pulleys, gears
and you would press a button and it would start running round and round and
round. Somebody asked, “What does that thing do?” He said, “I don’t know, but
doesn’t it run beautifully?” That sounds a lot of our congregations. They are
running beautifully but without purpose. We are doing it well, but should we be
doing it at all?
1st Thessalonians
5:21 tells us “But examine everything
carefully; hold fast to that which is good”. We need to examine all our
works to see is this is really doing any good. Time and energy are limited
resources. We need to make sure they are not being wasted.
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