Welcome to the “age of distraction!” Are you good at multitasking – doing more than one thing at a time? Multitasking is all the rage in our 24/7 cultures but can it actually be done? Good question.
There have found in studies, the brain is unable to effectively focus on more than one thing at a time. So, just face it, Multi-tasking is one of those great lies! I heard a teaching last Sunday about the “Art of Resting.” He touched on Multitasking and this inspired me to look at this, a little closer.
Luke 10:38-42 As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!” “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”
Jesus calls Martha out for trying to multitask. He calls her out because she is distracted. She is not fully present to his teaching. Are you distracted by your many tasks? Are you fully present to Christ?
We live in the 24/7 information age where the world appears never to sleep; work is no longer something you leave in the office; our homes are permanently connected to the Internet or have the TV on in the background, and we spend all our time multitasking and networking just to try and keep up with the pace of it all. There just seems to be no time to stop, be still, or even to pray.
Mark 6:31 Then, because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, he said to them, “Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.”
So here it is, multitasking is for God not men. Jesus whole life was filled with this distractive influence. Everywhere Jesus goes there is a crowd pressing on Him, a crowd jostling for position, some shouting out questions, and some straining to hear what Jesus is saying, some arguing with His disciples who are doing their best to protect him.
Yet Jesus makes time for people. And yet, Jesus was a man on a mission. His ultimate destination was a lonely cross on a hill outside Jerusalem where at just the right time He would die for the sins of the world. This is a point worth making as we think about our own busy lives, the Christian faith is ultimately about relationships, about God’s care for you and me.
When someone came before Jesus with a real and deep need, His response was never, “I’m too busy. I’ve got too many important things to do; when I’m finished; let’s arrange a date in a few weeks from now when my schedule’s free”. Jesus just stopped. He made time. He listened.
I wonder how you react when someone unexpected asks you for help or even asks you for prayer? In our stressed, multitasking and busy lives our tendency is not to see people as individuals, but see them as stereotypes or representatives of a particular group.
Jesus looks beyond our outward labels and to the individual underneath. In our busy lives, if we’re honest, we don’t make much time for the people who are on the edges, the people who have obvious and apparently intractable problems. They take up too much of our time, and they interfere with our schedules and our deadlines. Oh yes, we might offer them a short prayer or exchange with them a kindly word, but we still keep them at arm’s length before they really become a bother.
For Jesus all people are worthy of as much attention, for the very simple reason that all people are people of faith, and that when it comes to matters of faith there are no first-class and second-class believers. You either believe in Jesus, or you don’t. And how much money you earn, or the job you do, or the status you have in society is in this sense irrelevant.
The ways they express their faith may be very different, but we should never be blind to the fact in God’s sight they are equal. And I believe that if we really took this truth to heart, if we actually followed the example Jesus sets, that our life as believers and the way we live our lives day by day would be transformed and less stressed.
I wonder, how often do we let people tell the whole story about themselves? Listening to people can be a costly, time-consuming exercise. It is a process that can often be interrupted by the telephone ringing, or the e-mail arriving, or the sudden realization there’s another appointment to go to.
It would nice to imagine that one day we could be walking along and there is Jesus in front of us healing the sick, raising the dead, preaching the kingdom. But that’s not going to happen. Because, instead, Jesus calls us to be the body of Christ, His physical presence here on earth. And so if people are going to come to a living faith in Jesus. Do we really make space to form deep relationships with folk we meet or do people see a group of busy individuals who have no time to meet them at their point of need? Or are we too busy with our lives?
How much effort do we take to look beneath the label or to welcome those on the margins? Are we willing to listen to the whole of people’s stories and invest the time and love in them so that they too can come to a living faith in Jesus?
One thing about so called multi-taskers in the modern day. They don’t last. They burn out. Multi-tasking is God’s thing. It has the exact opposite effect on us. Keeping a heavenly perspective gives us the drive, the stamina, to honor God in our lives. A desire to honor God naturally leads to representing God through deed and truth. And honoring and representing God through our actions leads us back around to keeping our minds focused on heaven.
So keep focused on God, and let him do the multitasking.
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