pat loughery

Almost 60% of Christians around the world feel their hectic schedule prevents them from spending more time with God. That’s what Michael Zigarelli, a Charleston Southern professor, found after polling more than 20,000 Christians from 139 countries about the busyness of their lives and how it affects their relationship with God. His report, which concludes almost six years of data collection, echoes the obvious: yes, we’re busy people; and yes, our hectic lives prevent us from spending more time with God. A few elements to Zigarelli’s study are particularly fascinating.

**American Christians aren’t necessarily the busiest. Japan, the Philippines, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Mexico and Indonesia all had a higher percentage of believers who stated they often or always rushed “from task to task.”

**African Christians are most likely to claim their busyness gets in the way of developing their relationship with God. (Two out of three South African and Nigerian believers stated this.)

**The United States is the only country where women topped men in saying they were 1) almost always busy and 2) that busyness affected their spiritual walk.

While a whopping 72 percent of Christian lawyers said their overloaded pace of life interfered with growing in the Lord, almost two out of every three pastors made the same claim.

Source: ASSIST News Service, reported here.

Well, that’s a big “duh”, isn’t it? We’re too busy, we’re doing too much, and we know it. Our global culture’s Way of Life is busier than we want it to be, and most of us are simply caught up into it, unwilling or unable to think though how we might escape the swirl of activity.

The question is, what are we doing about it? (The other question is, of course, ‘why?’, but that’s not the question I want to focus on here.

I have the honor of leading a retreat this weekend, and we’ll talk about the issue of busyness and more importantly, what we’re doing about it. I hope to introduce some values and practices of spiritual formation gleaned from various monastic movements, and give our guests some resources to help them to live their way of life more intentionally, more slowly, and more on purpose.

More to come.