During this snow break I was able to read the book Crazy Busy by Kevin DeYoung today during Micah and Caroline's nap time. I have heard about this book for a while, wanted to read it, and after I got word that the book was $.99 on Kindle I had to jump on it!
I loved this book! It was very much an encouragement to me, and the big take away for me was about priorities... Something I realize about myself is that a juggle lots of roles... Husband, father, teacher, coach, musician, student, leader at our church, etc. This book has given me a new focus to really be fully present individually in all of these roles, and yet still find rest while juggling these roles. It also caused me to think differently about social media and the priority it holds in my life, and also email and the expectations I have for myself and others.
Here are a few of my highlights from the book:
- Am I trying to do people good or trying to look good? we are more concerned about looking good than with doing good.
- The Ten Commandments are not easy commands. But they don’t overwhelm me. Doing something about the global AIDS crisis, tackling homelessness, getting water to an impoverished village—these overwhelm me.
- Is it possible that God is not asking me to do anything about sex trafficking right now?
- He didn’t want to say we should do something about all suffering, because we can’t do something about everything. But we can care.
- Every Christian should be involved in the Great Commission, but not everyone will move overseas.
- Jesus didn’t meet every need...He hid away to pray. He got tired. He never interacted with the vast majority of people on the planet...He spent thirty years in training and only three years in ministry... He did not try to do it all. And yet, he did everything God asked him to do.
- Jesus was so terrifically busy, but only with the things he was supposed to be.
- Jesus understood that all the good things he could do were not necessarily the things he ought to
- Think about it: Jesus wasn’t just turning down an opportunity to play in the community soccer league. He said no to people who had diseases—diseases he could have healed instantly. The disciples didn’t understand why he wasn’t attending to the urgent needs right in front of him.
- Jesus understood his mission.
- Dave Crenshaw argues that the brain really can’t put forth effort in two mental processes at the same time. We are not multi-tasking but actually “switch-tasking.”
- Stewarding my time is not about selfishly pursuing only the things I like to do. It’s about effectively serving others in the ways I’m best able to serve and in the ways I am most uniquely called to
- Kids are safer than ever before, but parental anxiety is skyrocketing.
- Parents make their work more difficult than it has to be because they overestimate how much depends on them for the future well-being of their children.
- While upbringing can make a big difference in the short run, scholars argue that, in the long run, grown twins display personality and sociological behaviors owing more to heredity than to environment.... His (Dave Crenshaw) contention, though, is that within the framework of a pretty “normal” family in the developed world, different approaches to parenting do little to determine the kind of adult the child will become.
- The best things we can do for our kids is to find a way to stop being so frantic and frazzled.
- The kids rarely wished for more time with their parents, but, much to the parents’ surprise, they wished their parents were less tired and less stressed.
- My point in unpacking Caplan’s book is not to make us all biological determinists. Our genes will never fully explain the variations in human behavior.
- While the proverbial wisdom of Scripture (Prov. 22:6) and the promises of the covenant (Gen. 17:7) tell us that good Christian parents and good Christian children normally go together, we must concede that God is sovereign
- “Parents with unbelieving children, friends with children in jail, the discoveries of the geneticists, and the faith heroes in Hebrews 11 are all powerful reminders of this truth: We will parent imperfectly, our children will make their own choices, and God will mysteriously and wondrously use it all to advance his kingdom.”
- Certainly, there are lots of ways that good parents make their kids a little more manageable from day to day, but even the kid hooked on Angry Birds who just downed a pack of Fun Dip and is now watching his fifth Pixar movie of the week still has a decent shot at not being a sociopath.
- Just know that the longer I parent the more I want to focus on doing a few things really well, and not get too worked up about everything else. I want to spend time with my kids, teach them the Bible, take them to church, laugh with them, cry with them, discipline them when they disobey, say “sorry” when I mess up, and pray a ton.
- We must realize that, as the presence of digital devices and digital dependence grows, with this growth comes new capabilities and new dangers.
- I’ve noticed the same thing happening to me for the past few years. I can’t seem to work for more than fifteen minutes without getting the urge to check my e-mail, glance at a blog, or get caught up on Twitter. It’s a terrible feeling.compulsive nibblers of info-snacks.”
- “The only thing my mind can do, indeed the only thing it wants to do, is plug back into that distracted frenzied blitz of online information.”
- “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”
- But we could do with a little more “distance” from technology, a little more awareness that there was life before the latest innovations and there can be life without it.
- To my surprise the “charter” (charter on emailing) had very helpful advice about reducing time spent on e-mail: don’t ask open-ended questions; don’t send back contentless replies; don’t cc for no good reason; don’t expect an immediate response. It’s amazing the way my impatience works. If I text someone, I expect a response in seconds. If I e-mail, I might allow for a couple of hours, but with friends I expect to hear back in a matter of minutes. Cutting back on busyness is a community project. We must allow that slow replies and short replies are not rude.
- We have to stop taking our phones to bed. We can’t check Facebook during church. We can’t text at every meal.
- Of all the little bad habits I have that contribute to my busyness, the habit of checking my e-mail right before I go to bed and checking it as soon as I wake up is probably the worst.
- The biggest deception of our digital age may be the lie that says we can be omni-competent, omni-informed, and omni-present. We cannot be any of these things. We must choose our absence, our inability, and our ignorance—and choose wisely.
- we should rest in Christ alone for our salvation. But along with that there is still an abiding principle that we ought to worship on the Lord’s Day and trust God enough to have a weekly routine where we cease from our normal labors.
- But according to the Bible, both work and rest can be good if they are done to the glory of God.
- Many of us are less busy than we think, but life feels constantly overwhelming because our days and weeks and years have no rhythm.
- We never quite leave work when we’re at home, so the next day we have a hard time getting back to work when we’re at work.
- We have no routine, no order to our days. We are never completely “on” and never totally “off.”
- God made us to need sleep, and when we think we can survive without it, we not only spurn his gift (Ps. 127:2); we show our mistaken self-reliance.
- Going to sleep is our way of saying, “I trust you, God. You’ll be okay without me.” We regale each other with stories of great saints who got up at four or five o’clock in the morning to pray, forgetting that in the days before electricity most people went to bed soon after dark and woke up earlier in the morning.
- By all accounts, we are sleeping less than ever before. The average American gets two and a half fewer hours of sleep per night than a century ago.
- Sometimes the godliest thing you can do in the universe is get a good night’s sleep—not pray all night, but sleep.
- The antidote to busyness of soul is not sloth and indifference. The antidote is rest, rhythm, death to pride, acceptance of our own finitude, and trust in the providence of God.
- Mary’s example is not a summons to the contemplative life in a cloister. But it’s a pretty strong reminder that we had better keep first things first.
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