I was thinking about this recently. It seems like Philippa and I manage to fill our diaries pretty much every week - which isn't too hard given that we've both got full time jobs, help out at various church things as well as managing the regular weekly tasks (shopping, cleaning, washing etc) and spending the odd free moment actually relaxing!
I know that this is the case for many of the people at Fordham - particularly those who work for the church.
I know one or two people who have committed themselves to so much they've just burned out. You can do too much!
So I had a few questions with regard to busyness:
1) How busy do you think is too busy?
2) How busy do you think God wants us to be? Do you think it matters? - i.e. maybe it would actually be better to do a bit less but put a bit more time into our relationships, for example. Often friendships get left by the wayside when we have more "important" things to be doing.
3) Leading on from the last question: in a church there are usually a million and one things to do and not enough people to do them. In that situation, do you: (a) scale up the amount of work you do, possibly leading to eventual burn-out, or (b) scale back the amount you do?
Some thoughts would be appreciated
I have a book called "Going the Distance" by Peter Brain which deals with the issue of busyness (specifically related to working in pastoral ministry), and it's quite helpful, but I was wondering what other people thought
