As school picks up, I find myself saying “I don’t have time” more and more with each passing day. Homework, club meetings, work, church, family, friends, significant other. It all adds up, and pretty soon I’m stuck wondering how I ever had time to read a book, grab a coffee or, say, write a blog post.
Sometimes it feels like being Elastigirl from The Incredibles, stretching in a million different directions right up to the breaking point. As you might guess, it was only a matter of time until all that hustle and bustle took a hit on my quality of life. The quality of my spiritual life, too.
Lazy summer mornings on the patio, sipping coffee over the Word, have long since given way to granola bars on the go. Now I’m lucky if I even have time to throw on some mascara before running out the door to catch the bus. After a while, it becomes so easy to simply say, “I don’t have time.” In reality, it’s not about how much time I have, but how I spend that time. A friend of mine once posted something on Facebook that really resonated with me:
“Every time you go to say ‘I don’t have time,’ substitute it with ‘that’s not a priority.’”
Seems silly, but you’ll be surprised how quickly you may realize that your priorities are not the same thing in theory and in practice. It requires little of us to say that God is our number one priority, but it requires a great deal more to prove it by carving out time from our jam-packed schedules.
Being busy in and of itself isn’t a bad thing, but placing our daily agendas before God is really just well-disguised idolatry. Crazy, right? So the next time you’re tempted to say, “I don’t have time,” say “that’s not a priority” instead. If you’re anything like me, it might be just the wake-up call you need.