A New Year Reminder

Ben Patterson, Leadership Journal's contributing editor, gave me a strong wake-up call by his article, Leader's Insight: Our Chief Work.





Patterson wrote :
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I read an article that created a great deal of anxiety in me. It was entitled "If You Are 35, You Have 500 Days to Live." Subtract the time you will spend sleeping, working, and tending to personal matters such as hygiene, odd chores, eating, and traveling. In the next 36 years you have 500 days of leisure. If this world is all there is, then none of us should waste our time praying. We should literally be grabbing for all the gusto we can get.

We see precisely that all around us. Yet, as leisure time increases, so do the problems of emptiness, boredom, and restlessness. We have, as a culture, a frantic
determination to relax, unwind, and have fun. Where an earlier generation may
have been compulsive about work, we are compulsive about what we do with our
leisure time. Martha has become the patron saint of American recreational
life.

Of course, this affects the church. Activists that we are, we all feel there is so much to do and so little time to do it. A sign of our times, religiously, is the fact that Hans Küng's otherwise brilliant theological work On Being a Christian did not have a chapter in it on prayer. When asked about its absence, he apologized and admitted it was a serious oversight. But, he explained, at the time of writing he was so harassed by the Vatican and busy trying to meet his publisher's deadline that he simply forgot. That is my point exactly. Prayer is always the first thing to go when we get caught up in the world's pace. And only prayer can deliver us from that pace

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An important reminder for a New Year.