Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - COVID Killed Busyness ... How Can We Keep It Dead? | Keith and Patrick

Episode Date: May 21, 2020

COVID-19 is the Marie Condo of BUSY schedules. It's wiped our activity schedules clean and given us time back for the small things that make life full. Time for hobbies, impromptu game nights, family, prayer, or reading. Kids can knock on a friends door and know they'll be home to play. COVID has given us space for all the small priorities a busy schedule crowds out. In this episode Keith and Patrick talk about why we were all so busy before Coronavirus, and how we can protect our schedules from business after we slowly return to life post-lockdown. Interested in more content like this? Scroll down for more resources and related episodes, including a ten-day devotional on https://info.thecrossingchurch.com/rest-and-recovery-daily-devotionals?hsCtaTracking=4d3988a8-ead0-4327-a0d2-137811d595dc%7C5f470a6e-b263-4186-b223-3382a4104e1a (Rest and Recovery) and tips on https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/how-to-break-and-make-life-changing-habits/ (How to Make and Break Life-Changing Habits). Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO (Facebook), https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/thecrossingcomo (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO.  Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. So I remember getting a call from a family who goes to the crossing, and I had never met them, but they'd been coming a little bit. And I went over to meet them because the mom, kind of the matriarch of this family, was getting close to dying. And so you never know what to expect when you walk into someone's home who is near death. And what I found was a woman who was full of life. Yes, she was sick.

She was sitting in a chair. She had lost much of her ability to kind of function on her own because she was dying of cancer. But she had a lot of life and a lot of joy. And as I got to know this woman over the next several weeks, I just found that this woman was really confident in her death. And here's what I think that is. She explained to me that over the course of several years, she had watched her family members kind of move further and further away from Jesus. And she remembered praying, God, I want you to do anything in my life that you need to

in order to bring them back toward Jesus. I'll do anything, God. And it wasn't long after she prayed that, that she was diagnosed with cancer. And she told me as we sat in our living room that, she had seen God answer a prayer, that through that cancer, the people she loved and cared for had taken significant steps toward Jesus. And to be honest with you, some of those people are leaders in our church today who came back to Christ and got involved at the crossing because of a mom's prayer, but more than that, because of a mom's suffering. So I guess the point is that

in the midst of our suffering, God does a lot of really good things. And we, are sitting here in the middle of this global pandemic where there's been a lot of suffering. And yet my guess is if you're like us, you can see that God's been doing some good things, too, that God's been teaching people things. He's been opening our eyes to things we haven't seen. He's been changing our desires. He's been waking us up to some truth that maybe we should have seen for a long time. But the reality is that it took a global pandemic for us to be confronted with them. Patrick, are there some things that you have kind of learned or some bright spots in the middle of this difficult time?

I totally agree. There's no doubt that so many terrible things have happened already because of COVID-19. People have lost their lives. People have lost jobs. And yet, in the midst of it, God is doing good things in the lives of so many people. I know it's the case with my family. There are so many tiny little silver linings and things that we're doing as a family that I am really grateful and thankful for. I mean, I can make a long list of things, but one of the things my wife and I have been really thankful for in the midst of this is we've kind of reclaimed our time to pick up books, to do hobbies, to do things that the busyness of our life never gave us freedom to do. Another funny example was when COVID-19 started because we were juggling, watching kids, I had to start getting up really early in the morning to do my work.

And I wasn't usually getting up before 5 o'clock on most days. But now all of a sudden I was getting up at five. And now that we're past that point, I don't actually need to do it. I just kept getting up at five o'clock, which is great. Not because I can do more work, because now I'm spending more time in my Bible and spending more time praying. And it's been a really good thing for my heart. Are you a morning person or a night person? I'm definitely a morning person. But you didn't get up early. Well, I would usually get up between 5.30, 6 o'clock, 6.30. But a lot of times, honestly, I couldn't get up early because we made so many social commitments at night that I wouldn't get back home until 9.30. or 10 o'clock. And it's just, it's hard to get up at 5 o'clock. But when you can't do anything at night, I'm going to bed at 8.30 and 9 o'clock. It's awesome. It's hard to get up early when you have a hangover, isn't it? Is that what you meant by social? All of my social hours. It's weird. Every time I wake up, I have to take ibuprofen. No, it's just that's how life is. Because whether it's a ministry event on a Wednesday night and I'm out with people doing just normal things you do in a church, or it's we're hanging out with friends, or it's just Emily and I

staying up late. You create a pattern. of life where you're up later. It's harder to get up early and you lose margin for God. Yeah, there's been some bright spots. And I have to admit that our family at this point hasn't been terribly affected by the virus. I mean, yes, we've been doing the lockdown and the shelter in place and working at home and we have more of our kids at home because they didn't want to stay with their roommates, I guess. We have better food options is what they tell me. But that's as hard as it's gotten for us. People have had it a lot harder. So I want to be sensitive to that as I share some of the things that are bright spots for,

For us, my wife and I have been going on walks together, and we would have done that occasionally in the past, but we've been doing it more often in communicating, talking about stuff. I've been playing cards with my boys, and they're older. And so the chances of them sitting down and playing dumb card games with me when they have lots of options of things to do, well, it's probably not very good. What's your favorite card game? Well, we've been playing a stupid card game called golf that's completely based on luck, but we laugh and have fun with it.

Oh, I hate luck-based games. Well, I'm in just to hang out with them, to be honest. And it's pretty quick and painless. And in a normal busyness of life, those kinds of things wouldn't have happened. I was talking to someone the other day who told me that normally after school, her kids would go out and they'd go knocking on people's doors and ask, hey, can so-and-so come out and play? In 90% of the time, the answer was always the same. Oh, they're at dance practice. Oh, they're at soccer practice.

Oh, they're somewhere else. And when I heard that, I mean, I was a little bit surprised because when I was a kid, you could basically bank on the fact that if you went around the neighborhood, you'd get a whole gaggle of people together. We didn't call ourselves a gaggle, but that would have been cool. You can get a whole gaggle of people together and go and here's what's so cool. In the COVID-19 world, her son can go to friends' houses and they go and they play for half the day. They're going down to the lake and fishing and doing things that, honestly, kids should just be doing. And that's a silver lining. Along the same lines, we were celebrating Christine's birthday the other night, and all of a sudden, the doorbell rang, and we're like, somebody's at our door? This is weird. And when we go to the door, and they're just some good friends of ours, another couple, and they figured, well, they'll be home. Where else are they going to be? And they weren't selling you anything? It wasn't the Mormons that across the street from us or anything. So we just hung out with them around our dinner table for another hour or so, and it was a blast. But the whole point is that they knew we'd be home because, where else would we be, and they were free also. So I think a lot of the blessings that we're seeing center around that we're not so busy consumed with our own lives. And we're getting ready to head back into what I guess you'd call the new normal. It's going to take a while. There's going to be a transition. But what we're wanting to do in this episode is just ask ourselves, are there some things that we can learn from the quarantine, from sheltering in place, that we might want to

take into the new normal. When we get back to our normal lives, what are some of the things that we want to take with us from quarantine? And it seems to me that the biggest lessons that most people I know are taking away from this all center around busyness. So it might just be good to talk about a few things we're learning about busyness. And then maybe after that we can talk about some tips to actually take the good things from COVID-19, the things that we're learning and continuing to allow those good things to go on into our futures. But let's start with the whole busyness thing. One of the biggest things that I'm learning is that I'm not capable of controlling my busyness. We all kind of like to think, like, I'm in charge of my schedule, I plan my life out, I'm

choosing to do the things that I want to do. And yet what I've quickly discovered is that the things that are filling up my schedule, the things that made me constantly be running around and out and about are largely things I was not choosing. Not in the sense that I didn't sign up for it, but in the sense that I never sat down with my schedule and said, okay, what are my priorities in life? let's make sure that my schedule is matching out my priorities. It was more like this. Someone said, oh, your daughter doesn't do any activities. Oh, shoot, she's not doing an activity. She's three years old. She's going to be a failure. Okay, let's get her into dance. We've got to get going. We're going to make sure that she's going to be an all-star athlete or whatever it's going to be in the future. We've got to get going. And I realize, well, hold on. Is that actually the most important thing for me, for my daughter? Is that the thing I care most about? Well, I care about her knowing Jesus. And when I've got all this time all of a sudden, I'm like, hey, I can actually read her from the Bible.

I can read a story. It's creating huge opportunities. Okay, so Patrick, when you say that you're not in control of your own schedule, I don't know. I mean, that's not how I think I'm supposed to think. So what do you mean by that? Nobody's got a gun to your head. So you're out there and we're all making choices because one of the things that kind of drives me a little bit crazy. And this is true in my life. It's true just of human beings is that we've gotten into this shelter and play, shut down, not busy, nothing to do. And we really enjoy it, but we act like we can't control our schedule when we go back to the normal. But I'm pretty sure we can. I'm pretty sure no one's forcing us to sign our kids up or to be as busy as we were before. Yeah, I think there are so many

fears that busyness helps assuage. I can easily make an idol out of my work. I want to be perceived a certain way at my work. I want to be a hard worker. Someone that people say, oh yeah, he does everything, he's at everything, he's present. And what does that equal? It equals me being busy. And so for me to bow down to the idol of looking a certain way at work and being a certain kind of worker, I have to be busy all the time. And if I'm not busy, then all of a sudden I have to face up to the fear. What if I'm not as important as I think I am here? What if I'm not as good of a worker as I want people to think I am? Business allows me to worship that idol. So then I take it what you're saying is that we are in charge of our own schedule. It's just that we have let other things become dominant, ultimate, well, like you said,

an idol in our life. And so we're choosing to be busy in order to assuage that particular idol in our life. Is that what you're saying? Because one of the things that I don't want to do is start talking in language. Like, for example, a student says, I have to study. Well, no, you don't. You don't have to study. You could do something else if you wanted to. And of course, I know what the student means. The student means that if I want to get a good grade, I need to study now. But there's a big difference between saying, I have to study, than I choose to study because I really want to get a good grade in this class.

And one seems to empower me to say, I'm in charge of my schedule. I need to take responsibility for this. And the other one seems to lead me to think that I'm a victim. I'm having to do something. Someone else is imposing this upon me. And when I think I'm a victim, I don't take responsibility for my own choices. I let other people dictate to me what's important. Yeah, we should ask the question, am I scheduling my priorities, or, if I could be this,

frank, are my idols scheduling my priorities for me? Are the things that I care about and worship the most? Are those the things that are determining what I'm putting into my schedule? Is the reason why my kid is spending every weekend outdoing sporting events because he or she sincerely has a future in basketball. I hate to break it to you. Probably not. I mean, just statistically speaking, the odds aren't high. Now, there might be good reasons to go do that, but is the real reason that we're doing it is I'm afraid that my kid won't get onto this basketball team in the high school. I'm afraid that if they don't do this, they're going to lose

these friends. We should think through and know why we're scheduling and putting things in. We should know the values behind it. We should think about it. So let's back up here and maybe a 30,000 foot view for just a moment. If I'm going to put a puzzle together, The first thing I do is get out to pieces and turn them all the right side up, and then I set the box, the lid of the box, in a place that I can see it. Because I have to have an idea in my head of where I'm trying to get of what this picture should look like. Imagine trying to do a puzzle in which you dumped out all the pieces and threw the box away. So you had no idea what you were trying to put together. Is it a mountain scenery or is it a butterfly?

You don't know. You're just putting pieces together. Those are your favorite puzzles, mountains and butterflies? I'm horrible at puzzles. But you see that we got to have a vision for what we're trying to do in our life before we can put the puzzle pieces together. If without that vision, then we're just sticking one piece to the next. And I'm afraid a lot of us, I know this is true of me. I live in a way that's a day-to-day.

I just take one piece and try to stick it to another piece and try to stick it to another piece. instead of going, here's the kind of person I want to be. Here's where I want to be in six months or a year. Here's the kind of worker. Here's the kind of friend. Here's the kind of father. Here's the kind of husband I want to be. And if I have a vision for where I want to end up,

then I can make sense out of the individual pieces, the individual choices that come day by day. It's super easy to just force one piece into the next piece into the next one. I think one reason why we don't look at the big puzzle box is on the one hand, life's kind of easy if I just let other people tell me what to add on. just do this, then this, then this. But here's the bigger reason. I think we don't like being alone with ourselves. I don't think we like what we see when we slow down and we say, okay, where do I want to be in 20 years? What should my life be all about? And when we slow down and we get into solitude and we think

about those things, we realize, oh my gosh, I don't know. I don't know what I'm living for. I don't know why I'm making the decisions that I'm making. Or we look and we see what we've done in the past and we realize, I've built a mess. I haven't done anything that I would have chosen to do if I had actually thought about the bigger picture. I think being alone with yourself is a terrifying prospect. And again, busyness allows you to never have to do that. You never have to reflect. You never have to ask, is this actually a good use of my time? Is this actually the direction I want to be going? And there's a big cost if you don't reflect. So you're saying that maybe we're busy, not against our will, but in alignment with our will. In other words, we want to be

busy. Because if we're busy, then we don't have to wrestle with difficult questions. We don't have to think hard about life. We just run around from one thing to the next. So maybe busyness is a drug. Not only does it say I'm important, but maybe it's kind of a drug that keeps me from having to be fully engaged with the difficult challenges of life. Yeah, and one of those forms of busyness that can still happen in quarantine is just the digital distractions that we're constantly putting into our life. We feel busy not because we're actually having things going on, but because I've got a really busy Instagram schedule to keep up with. There's a famous comedian who talks about what happens when he's in his car and he turns off the radio and he sets up side his phone and he just sits there in the silence and

he says he feels like he has to stare into the great empty, to the big empty. He just feels totally alone, totally vacuous. And I think if you set aside your phone, if you go into a moment of solitude, you might feel some of the same fear, some of the same things. And being busy protects you from it. But I think on the other side of looking into that emptiness and actually answering the questions, what am I living for? What am I here for? Where am I going? On the other side of that is a purposeful life. Anybody who knows me knows that I love to be busy. And so I feel like that I have to be honest that I am not the best person at slowing down and thinking about big questions in life. So I'm not sitting in my lazy boy smoking a pipe, pondering the big questions of life.

I've never walked into the office and seen Keith staring listlessly out the window, considering the things. No, it's not me at all. And so I don't want to give the wrong impression. Like, I have this well-ordered life that always is in alignment with my values. I'm probably, compared to most people, super busy. There's a book called Seven Habits of Highly Effective People that's old. I think, in fact, they've come out with a kind of a freshened up version of it.

But I read it years and years ago, and there are things in it that I can remember as if I read them yesterday. And one of the things it says is that if you don't know where you're going, if you don't know where you're headed, if you don't have that picture of the puzzle for your life in your mind, then what you end up doing is empowering circumstances or other people to make decisions for you, to set your priorities. So like you said earlier, maybe it's your friend's kids or other parents or maybe it's something you see in social media or it's just the circumstances of life that kind of take over. And so I've always thought to myself, I want to know where I'm headed and then I am super busy trying to get there. So for me personally, I'm not very good at slowing down, but hopefully I am fairly decent at being busy with worthwhile things. Let me change the subject for just a second. Again, bigger picture. We're talking about what is COVID showing us about our schedules, about our lives, what are the things that we want to carry over

into the future. And a lot of it has to do with busyness. One thing that I never realized made me super busy. I mean, I just, I would never even put it as a category of busyness is shopping. I'm talking about online shopping, going to the store shopping, and not just shopping, but having stuff in the sense that having stuff takes a lot of time. And he's, I wish you could see him. He just gave me an awesome look like, what the heck are you talking about? Patrick, the online shopaholic. What do you buy when you're on Amazon? Books. I can go onto Amazon and look through book after book. And you stop that now in COVID? I took the Amazon app off my phone so that I wouldn't look at books online. But booklust.

I could write that book. Private school. And I would lust after that book. Okay. Again, now that we can't go out, you can shop online on your phone. But the funny thing is now it totally takes away the excitement when I, I realize it's going to take three weeks for Amazon to get me a book. Keith could laugh at me because at one point I wanted this book so desperately. I spent probably an hour and a half working around how to get it online in a PDF form. So I could get into the place that I wanted to get. I just had to have the book. My bigger point here is shopping, whether it's online or otherwise. It takes up a huge amount of time.

And not just that. When you get the stuff, it takes up your time. I mean, think about any digital device you get, how much time that sucks out of your day. Or if you get a new toy or hobby or thing that you're going to use, You have to clean it. You have to maintain it. You have to use it. Having stuff means you have to constantly be decluttering, organizing, moving things around.

Having stuff is a massive, massive time cycle. Not to mention it's not great for your budget. And so it's been funny without being able to go to the stores as much, without being able to get things shipped to me immediately. Not only are we saving money, we're saving time because we're shopping less and we're spending less time dealing with our stuff. Okay, so let's talk about six tips that we have learned or thought about how to take some of the things that we've learned in lockdown about busyness and scheduling and transport

them into the new normal so that we don't end up a year from now back in the same position we were before. So the first one is this. Let's watch our language. Because I think that how we talk often reflects how we think about our life and in this context about our time. So instead of saying, I have to study for this test, why don't we say I choose to study for this test? Why don't we say I choose to study for this test. In light of my values, in light of where I'm headed, I think this is a smart use of time. Or instead of saying, I have to hang out with these people, say, well, these are the friends that I've chosen to invest in. And if I want to invest in other friendships, of course, I have the opportunity to do that. Instead of saying, I have to work late tonight, say, well, I want to be a great worker.

I want to do my work in a way that honors God and that is really making a contribution to the business. and therefore I'm going to choose to stay a couple hours late tonight in light of those priorities. I think just changing the way that we talk makes us feel like we are in charge of our time instead of the victim of other people's choices. I am such a I have to person. Even as you're talking, I'm thinking of things that I tell myself, I have to do this bedtime routine with my kit. It would be so cool if I could change that around and say, like, hey, I get to sit down in a chair with my daughter and read her a story and we get to have that time together. Or I'm, I'm, a introvert, so I often have to do social events. We're going to go hang out with someone. I'm like,

oh, I have to go hang out with these people. Say, no, I'm choosing to go spend time with these people because we care about them and we want to invest in their lives. And I really like it, not just because it takes me out of kind of a victim mindset as though I'm just receiving my schedule and it's just happening to me, but also for what you just said, it makes me take responsibility for it. If I can't say I'm choosing to do this, this is something that I value and I think I should be doing, then maybe I need to stop. Well, and you can't say that unless you know where you're headed. So I guess that's our second tip is align your schedule with your values. But of course, in order to do that, you've got to have some values. You've got to know where you're headed. You've got to be

able to see the picture that the puzzle will eventually become. And how are you going to do that for your life? Where do you want to be a month from now, six months from now, 10 years from now? If you can't answer that question, you won't know which things to choose to do and which things to say no to. So, for example, what do I want my kids to remember about their time at home with me? And do I want to remember that I was really committed to going to all their sporting events? That I ran them around and was kind of the taxi cab driver? Do I want them to remember that I made as much money as possible so that we could go on the best vacation as possible? what do I want them to remember? And I think that what we would all say is that we want our kids to know that we loved them, that we are engaged with them about important issues that we shared life together. Well, there's not a lot of sharing life if all you're doing is irritably driving people around from one event to the next. Now, maybe I'm projecting my bad attitude onto you. And maybe you have great conversations there. I always wanted to have great conversations in those moments, but I never quite had as many

as I hoped I would. But sitting down for meals together, playing games at night together, doing like you said, Patrick, if you have younger kids, having a bedtime routine that you do together, those are the kind of things that over time, over years, in fact, it leads to your kids going, you know what I remember about my mom and dad? They were really engaged with me, and we had a great relationship, and we did life together. Now, I'm not saying that's the ultimate thing everybody wants their kid to say. But you can see that there are some different alternatives there that depending on what you want from, there are some different alternatives that you can choose from. And ultimately, what you want your kids to remember about their childhood will play out in the decisions you make from day to day.

I think that applies really to any relationship. I mean, that's true in a marriage. My wife and I try to set aside time to do this thing we called Phanos, which is an acronym F-A-N-O-S, which stands for feelings, affirmations, needs, owning, and spirituality. And we walk through this acronym. You can do it in five minutes or you can do it in two hours if you want to. And you just answer the question, how am I feeling? How can I affirm you? How can I share my needs? And it's a thing that we have to schedule because what we've discovered as parents with young kids is if we don't talk about it, we're going to be that couple 20 years down the road who has their kids leave the house and they say, I don't even know you. We've been running this business of our family together really well, but we don't even have a marriage. You got to schedule your marriage. You got to schedule your marriage.

It's got to be a part of your priority list. And the same thing goes for friendships. I mean, it seems goofy to schedule times regularly with friends. But if you've got a really important friendship, put it into your schedule, make it something that you don't drop off. This is one reason we do small groups. You have a community of people who say, you know what? It's hard to commit one night a week to be together and to connect and to do our lives together.

But if we don't do that, there is no life together. So you can't be in a small group if you have your schedule so full of other things that it's always second or third or fourth on your list. It's not going to work. And you're going to get to the end of your. life and think, I never had Christian community. Well, yeah, you didn't look at the puzzle box. I love the way you put that because there are so many good things that we could be doing. We don't have a shortage of ideas of how we could spend our time. And many of them are good things,

or at least neutral things. And sometimes all the good things crowd out the best thing. So what is it you want out of your work life, your family life, your relationship with God? What do you want to be true when you die and then work backwards to know how to live today. Now, there's another phrase on the same topic of aligning your schedule with your values. There's another thing I remember from that book Seven Habits. And they said, don't prioritize your schedule. Instead, schedule your priorities. And I'm a list maker. I just want to make lists and then go down them one by one because I love checking things off. But this says, do I have the right things on my list? And sit down and at the beginning of each week and say, what are the important things this week? I'm going to put them in. Is it time

with God? Is it a relationship? Is it a conversation with a spouse? What is it that I want to make sure that I get in? Is it family dinners? Is it three nights a week? Five nights a week? What is it? And then put those on your schedule and make everything else fit around those important moments. When people look back on my life, I don't want them to say, oh man, that guy got a lot of stuff done. on to say he got the right stuff done he picked he chose he knew exactly what was the right thing and the only way that i know that i'm picking the right things is if i'm saying no to things if you look at your past before covid and realize we said no to almost nothing we said yes to virtually everything that's a pretty good sign that you're not scheduling your priorities there should be something in

your life that it was painful to say no to that's the only way i know of to be able to say with any sense of confidence that I am actually prioritizing the right things. One other tip. So we talked about changing your language, aligning your schedule with your values, and kind of along the same line, actually scheduling your priorities. And now four, I want to say this, leave space for unscheduled time. Leave space for unscheduled time. If you have no margin in your life, here's the first reality. You're going to be anxious all the time because it will only take one tiny little thing popping in that you didn't expect to make every domino fall over. And not having any margin is a great, great, great recipe for anxiety. But number two, there is so

much of life that is lost if we don't have space to rest. One big thing being God, I find that people who have no margin are typically people who have no time for prayer. They have no time for the Bible. They have no time for self-reflection. They don't have moments where God's spirit can actually speak to them and guide them and tell them, hey, here's ways that I want you to be growing and maturing and walking with me. And I think beyond that, having unscheduled time gives us space for fun, for life, for play. And that might sound like a really silly thing to prioritize, but I don't think it's silly at all. I can't have fun with my daughter when I'm so busy that I'm always worried about the next thing. Or like Keith said, what's better than having an unscheduled hangout

with friends? I hate scheduling things ahead of time with friends. I dread it. It makes me dread hanging out with friends. It's just the way I'm watching. but when someone just pops in out of the blue, that's fun. I'm like, oh, this is unexpected. I'm excited about it. So having that unscheduled time to rest, to connect with God, to have time for play, I think is a huge thing that we can learn from COVID. Just listening to you, I felt incredibly convicted because I do not have a lot of unscheduled time. Even if I have things that are what somebody might think of restful or life-giving, like reading a book or listening to a podcast while I walk on the tree, rail, those are scheduled in my mind. Those are achievements to make. And I think it comes down to me having too high a view of myself that I think I can do it all. I think that I can be a part of

it all. It's like that song in Hamilton where the guy says, I want to be in the room where it happens. And I find that I want to be in that room always with my family, at work, with friends. I always want to be in that room. I don't think I have limits. And eventually that wears on me because I get irritable or grouchy, frustrated, or I just get to a point where I'm like, I can't do anymore. And it's almost like my body, my mind just shuts it down for a while. One of the most shocking things in the gospel of Luke is how he again and again and again underlines the fact that Jesus set aside time for solitude. I hate those words. Those are the verses that Keith tries to cut out of the Bible.

Gosh, I hate those verses because that's just not... I'm like, do I have to do that, or can I just say I'm not wired like Jesus? That's not my temperament. That was Jesus' personality. But it's so shocking. I mean, someone who I think we would all want to say accomplished more in his life, his short life than anyone else in human history actually had space for solitude, which would seem to suggest, and I'm talking to you, Keith, that somehow solitude is a key to actually accomplish

the right things in life. You just got all Jesus see there on me. And I probably need it. I've learned about this. I've read about it. I've thought about it. I'm just not super good at putting it my life. And I think part of it comes down to what am I going to say no to? And maybe that comes down to that in a lot of our areas of our life. What good things will we say no to so we can say yes to the best thing? And maybe that's I need to say no to this sports league. I need to say no to taking in this extra project at work. I need to say no to every night out with friends. I got to say no to something to be able to carve out that time alone with God, that margin, that rest, that peacefulness. It's not so much for me that I don't want it. It's that I don't want

to say no to the things that compete with it. One other tip. I already kind of mentioned this earlier, but I'll make it short, buy less stuff. Simplicity is not a virtue, but maybe it should be in the materialist, consumeristic world that we're living. It's a virtue that I'm trying to embrace more in my life. It's good for your budget. It's great for your time. And I think it's good for your soul. That's one thing I'm learning. And I think it'll be surprised. If you buy less stuff, you will have more time. All right. Last one. Distinguish your circle of responsibility from your circle of concern. Again, another lesson I learned from that crazy seven habits book. So if you imagine two concentric circles, the smaller circle inside is your circle of responsibility. And the larger circle,

is your circle of concern. And we're all concerned about a lot of things in life that we are not responsible for. You might be concerned about world hunger, and rightly so, but that's not your personal responsibility. You might be concerned about a friend finding a job, but that's not your personal responsibility. So in your circle of concern, you should pray about. But in your circle of responsibility, you need to pray and take action. So can you distinguish between those? What am I responsible to do? Because some of us are prone to trying to expand our circle of responsibility to take on things that really aren't ours. Maybe expand our circle of responsibility to take responsibility for things that should belong to our kids or should belong to a coworker or belong only to God

and not to us. So one thing I am prone to do in my life is expand my circle of responsibility so that I feel responsible for a lot of things that, to be honest, I can't do anything about. So sometimes what I do is I just make a list in my journal. And then over the top of that list, I am not the Messiah. I can't do all these things. I can pray about them. I can trust God with them, but I can't do them. I can't make them happen. And maybe that would, alleviate some of the pressure and tension and anxiety you feel if you can clearly distinguish. What is your responsibility versus your concern? Only God can be everywhere. Only God can do everything. And COVID-19 is teaching us that we have to stop trying to be God. It's shown us that we can't be.

I mean, in a way we've never seen, there's so much that's out of our control. And that's okay. That's the way it actually always was. I think COVID-19 has kind of been like the Marie condo of schedule cleaners. It has come into our lives. it has wrecked our schedules. It's turned off literally everything. Events are closed, places are closed, and we all of a sudden have all of this free time, all of this free space back into our lives. And my hope is that this episode will allow you to see some of the small, positive things that have come from that in your life and to actually act on them, to make sure that when we come back from COVID as we're slowly opening back up, that you don't just start doing

things again, that you actually start getting the right things done. You start living with the end in mind. Don't go back to normal if that means going back to the way things were before. Be intentional. Think about this. What kind of life do you want to live? COVID's given us a chance to reset, take advantage of it. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps others find this podcast more easily. Also ask yourself who you could share this podcast with. Texting an episode to a friend or family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.