Dear Bellefield Family,

If you’re a college student or professor, then you know we are entering the ending sprint. Final exams for Pitt, CMU, and Chatham happen now through the beginning of May. 

Whether or not this is a busy time for you, everyone who lives in the United States understands what being busy feels like. It is the defining adjective of our age.

“I’m good, but busy”, “things are crazy at work”, “I feel like I’m just running around all the time”, these are the top of mind responses people usually give to the question “how are you doing?” Even pastors fall into this. Many people over the years have pointed out that this response is often a kind of boasting, since we tend to derive credibility from what we do (I’m just so critically important, so many people need me!).

Yet even if there is an element of boasting in how we talk about how busy we are, it is also true that many of us are very, very busy. Our ancestors believed that modern technology was going to free us from the busyness and hardship of work and life, but in one of the deep ironies of history, technology has simply allowed us to replace one kind of busyness for another.

In some sense, we could say that this isn’t really a problem. Responsibility over creation is a good thing, and being busy with caring for creation can be deeply humanizing. However, if we are being honest with ourselves, for many of us the experience of this sort of busyness is soul-deadening. Our lives are consumed with tasks that we have insufficient time to complete properly, and so we bounce from one crisis to the next, trying to keep all the balls in the air.

There have been many solutions offered to this problem. Let me offer a simple one: in these seasons of busyness, one of the first things that we tend to drop is prayer. Resist this temptation.

“Your kingdom come, your will be done” is the second petition of the Lord’s prayer. When I pray it, I have taught myself to always emphasize the “your” in the petition. In busy times, I tend to fall into believing two lies: that the kingdom of my imagination is the kingdom of heaven, and that the successful execution of my plans will bring about the kingdom. But bringing this request before the Lord forces me to question both of those assumptions. I am then able to bring the busyness of life under the watch of the only one who is actually able to handle it: the Lord Jesus. 

I pray that the Lord would use all of your busy seasons to draw you closer to himself.

-In Christ,

Greg Burdette

Adult Sunday Classes

Meets at 9:45am, Fellowship Hall

Our class this semester is based on the book "Confronting Christianity: Twelve Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion" by Rebecca McLaughlin. Each week, we will look at a question that makes Christianity difficult for modern people to believe, and what resources Christianity provides to help us respond to those questions.

This Week: Back by popular demand, this Sunday Ron Bogan will finish talking through the question, "Doesn't the Bible condone slavery?" Join us as we think about and discuss this important topic.