Why we get on the merry-go-round in the first place

The lack of recent blog activity (now being overcompensated for) may have made you realise that I've been quite busy recently. I tend to go through phases of taking on too much, and Christmas was a wonderful rest from that. Tim Chester's The Busy Christian's Guide to Busyness is a brilliant book on how it is our lack of faith that often (although not always) leads us to be over busy. I highly recommend it.

But Helmut Thielicke said the same a few decades ago when preaching on the parable of the seed growing secretly (Mark 4:26-29):

Our overactivity, which constantly keeps us on the merry-go-round and yet, no matter how fast we go, gets us nowhere, but only makes us dizzy, is not caused by the fact that we were so nervous or that we had no time. It is just the opposite. We are nervous and we have no time because we think everything will stop without us and because we think we are so tremendously important - we parvenus [newcomers/upstarts] in this old business of creation! And this is why we can never let anything get out of our hands and be entrusted to others. That's why we hold on to everything convulsively and thus wear ourselves out all over again. Undoubtedly, all this is connected with the ultimate decisions of our life and not so much at all with medicine or with the problem of our modern way of life. And because we have thus taken over the management of the bankrupt assets of creation, because we do everything ourselves and therefore must always be producing something, we never get away from constant care and concern. For anybody who takes everything upon himself finds that everything depends on him.

(p.84f, The Waiting Father: Sermons on the Parables of Jesus)

Isn't the true gospel so freeing in comparison to the false gospel of our mastery over the world? No wonder it rest is so important in the bible. Not because passiveness towards the world is the ideal, but because God is active in caring for his creation.