I (and most pastors, I believe) become busy for two reasons; both are ignoble.

I am busy because I am vain.  I want to appear important.  Significant.  What better way than to be busy?  The incredible hours, the crowded schedule, and the heavy demands on my time are proof to myself – and to all who will notice – that I am important.  If I go into a doctor’s office and find there’s no one waiting, and I see through a half-open door the doctor reading a book, I wonder if he’s any good.  A good doctor will have people lined up waiting to see him; a good doctor will not have time to read a book.  Although I grumble about waiting my turn in a busy doctor’s office, I am also impressed with his importance.

Such experiences affect me.  I live in a society in which crowded schedules and harassed conditions are evidence of importance, so I develop a crowded schedule and harassed conditions.  When others notice, they acknowledge my significance, and my vanity is fed.

I am busy because I am lazy.  I indolently let others decide what I will do instead of resolutely deciding myself.  I let people who do not understand the work of a pastor to write the agenda for my day’s work because I am too slipshod to write it myself.  The pastor is a shadow figure in these people’s minds, a marginal person vaguely connected with matters of God and good will.  Anything remotely religious or somehow well-intentioned can be properly assigned to the pastor.

Because these assignments to pastoral service are made sincerely, I go along with them.  It takes efforts to refuse, and besides, there’s always the danger that the refusal will be interpreted as a rebuff, a betrayal of religion, and a calloused disregard for people in need.

It was a favorite theme of C. S. Lewis that only lazy people work hard.  By lazily abdicating the essential work of deciding and directing, establishing values and setting goals, other people do it for us; then we find ourselves frantically, at the last minute, trying to satisfy a half dozen different demands on our time, none of which is essential to our vocation, to stave off the disaster of disappointing someone.

But if I vainly crowd my day with conspicuous activity or let others fill my day with imperious demands, I don’t have time to do my proper work, the work to which I have been called.  How can I lead people into the quiet place beside the still waters if I am in perpetual motions?  How can I persuade a person to live by faith and not by works if I have to juggle my schedule constantly to make everything fit into place?