One of the key aspects of Lent is a desire to re-establish God’s priorities in our lives. Life can be so busy and frantic these days that God often gets squeezed out in the everyday rush. We all have the same number of hours in a day, but many of us live trying to squeeze more into a day than we have hours, which results in a sense of futility, helplessness and despair. Many people use this period to examine priorities and what is going on in a day in order to consciously ‘de-clutter’ our lives from practices which are no longer useful or helpful.
Ps 5:3 says ‘In the morning, Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait expectantly.’ Most of us find mornings a rush: the desire to stay in bed as long as possible fights against the need to be at work, school or elsewhere for a certain time, and we often end up having to choose between punctuality and prayer. Ps 4:4-5 says ‘when you are on your beds, search your hearts and be silent. Offer the sacrifices of the righteous and trust in the Lord’, but most of us are so exhausted by the time bedtime comes, we can barely keep our eyes open, let alone read God’s Word and pray. As we work through Lent, perhaps one of the things we need to do is examine our priorities so that we can give God more of our time.
Considering how much time we spend on the trivial may cause us to turn off the mobile phone and the TV or put aside the newspaper or the novel. There is nothing sinful in these things in themselves, but we so easily become addicted to things and need to look again at pruning our lives so that we can become even more fruitful. I used to spend the inordinate amount of time I spend on public transport in sleep, but now tend to spend that time in prayer, finding that I have gained enormous chunks of prayer time once I realised I could pray anywhere and did not have to be in my own home to pray effectively!
There is a ruthlessness required to prioritisation which our hearts often find difficult to enforce. My family tends to hoard possessions; my daughter-in-law detests clutter and frequently exhorts us to take black bags and get rid of things which are simply there, for no reason at all except our disinclination to tidy! We have to be prepared to get the black bin bags out and recognise that there is a spiritual laziness in our busyness: as Eugene Peterson says, ‘Sloth is most often evidenced in busyness … in frantic running around, trying to be everything to everyone, and then having no time to listen or pray, no time to become the person who is doing these things.’
Since we can’t be everything to everyone and can’t do everything we may want to do, we have to prioritise the things that are crucial, and nothing is more important than God. People often say, ‘I’m too busy for God’ or ‘I’m too busy to pray.’ The truth is, we are too busy NOT to pray and God is too important to ignore.
