Jesus and the Fast Forward button on your life

Can anybody relate to the I Love
Lucy chocolate wrapping episode? It
cracks me up every time. Partly because
my life often feels like that way – throwing so much at me that there’s no way
I can keep up. I scramble to maintain
appearances, but it often feels like someone pushed the fast forward button and it’s out of
control. There’s something peculiarly
American about this syndrome. Our family letters at Christmas lament
our breakneck pace, but we seem at a loss to do anything about it. The system is designed for failure. We can’t keep up – some part of our life is
bound to break – our marriage, our job and ultimately, our peace of mind.

Jesus didn’t live that way. He waited 30 years to begin his public
ministry. He regularly got away from the
crowds to pray. He winnowed his
disciples down to 12 he could focus on.

We call ourselves Jesus
followers, yet we look more like Lucy than Jesus. Caught up in a life on fast-forward where
something is bound to break.

The answer is to re-draw the
margins in our lives. I’ve gotten in the
bad habit of staying up late in the last several months – it sets in motion a
cascading series of events in my life that erases the quiet spaces where God
can speak to me and help me calibrate my pace.
And if I turn on the computer in the morning, it’s like hitting the
fast-forward button myself. It’s a bad habit and I need to ask myself, “If Jesus didn’t live that way, shouldn’t I pay attention and commit to changing my bad habit?”