God’s Good Work: Finding Purpose Beyond Frantic Activity

Blog by Alan Fadling

I often suspect that when busy Christian leaders hear me talk about living and working unhurried, they assume I don’t get much done. But I’ve come to believe that by working unhurried I get more important things done. Busy doesn’t always mean productive.

In An Unhurried Life, I wrote a chapter titled “Productivity: Unhurried Isn’t Lazy.” In it, I speak to our tendency to assume that productivity is always about doing more and more. But what if true productivity is, at least in part, about doing qualitatively better work, even if it seems we are less busy than before? There is a cultural bias for always staying busy. Many of us wear it as a badge of honor.

In that chapter, I quoted a passage from Thomas Merton that has lived in my imagination for a long while now. He says,

“[Some] are attached to activities and enterprises that seem to be important. Blinded by their desire for ceaseless motion, for a constant sense of achievement, famished with a crude hunger for results, for visible and tangible success, they work themselves into a state in which they cannot believe that they are pleasing God unless they are busy with a dozen jobs at the same time.” (pp. 206-7)

Merton wrote these words more than sixty years ago. Don’t they describe our lives today? We seem terrified of stopping, even for a moment, to ask ourselves: 

• Is what I am frantically busy doing right now actually all that important to me?
• In another month or another year, will I be grateful for everything I’m currently doing?

Those are questions that will grow your discernment at work.

The scriptures remind us that “we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10). I wonder if when we hear that, we assume it’s only talking about good deeds or about volunteer work we might do at church. Do we connect Paul’s words about “good works” with “good work” we might do in our jobs? We could.

I believe God cares about the work we do in our jobs even more than we do.

I believe that God is at work in advance of any particular workday, making ready good opportunities for us to engage in our daily work.

I believe we can learn how to become more discerning so that we learn how to do our jobs, whatever they may be, in a way that is more in keeping with God’s preparations and intentions.

I really believe that we are meant to do good things in our jobs that will ring into eternity.

But frantic busyness rarely if ever bears this kind of fruit. Hurry is shortsighted. It produces work done without a vital, long-term vision.

Back to Merton. It floors me how he says that people “work themselves into a state in which they cannot believe that they are pleasing God unless they are busy with a dozen jobs at the same time.”

We imagine that the only way to please God is to be frantically busy with more and more simultaneous projects. This is the way in which our bias for overwork and overbusyness actually ends up being far less productive in a way that really matters. And this exposes how hurry is too often less productive than a more unhurried pace.

Merton continues in that same passage, saying,

“Sometimes they fill the air with lamentations and complain that they no longer have any time for prayer, but they have become such experts in deceiving themselves that they do not realize how insincere their lamentations are. They not only allow themselves to be involved in more and more work, they actually go looking for new jobs.”

We often have mixed feelings about our busyness. Sometimes we complain about how busy we are. But sometimes we brag about it. And neither complaint nor boasting is a great mode for good work.

There is an irony when it comes to our bias for busy: Overbusyness can be a greater sign of soul laziness than inactivity is.

There is another passage from Merton that I’ve shared with countless leaders in my coaching and training work. In it, he offers an antidote for our frantic busyness rooted in a bias for overwork:

“There are times, then, when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all we simply have to sit back for a while and do nothing. And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform: and often it is quite beyond his power.” (An Unhurried Life, p. 123)

Too often we let our busyness completely distract and overwhelm us until we hardly remember that God is with us, that he invites us to himself, and that he has given us good opportunities he wants us to engage in a collaborative relationship with him.

Merton recommends that we instead do the courageous thing: Stop, sit back for a bit, and do nothing. Can you think of anything harder for someone who attaches to busyness as their primary identity? But can you think of any wiser counsel for the hurry-addicted?

There is an incongruity I’ve noticed in myself. When I’m soul weary, I find it’s easy to engross myself in relatively meaningless busyness, but it’s much harder to say yes to good work and then good rest.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll share more about how slowing down to rest can position us to do much better work.

For Reflection: 

• What is one area in your life where you are constantly busy, and how might slowing down help you achieve results for which you’d be more grateful?
• How do you currently define "productivity," and how might this definition change if you embraced a more unhurried approach?
• When was the last time you allowed yourself to stop, sit back, and do nothing, and what did you learn from that experience?