{Guest Post} Tricia Koechig on Overcoming a busy life: Saying no to the excess and yes to the eternal.
I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for young girls. Maybe it comes from working in teen ministries all these years, or from having four daughters of my own, but it’s a tough world out there, especially for girls, and I really have a desire to encourage them!
I love it when girls share with me what they are learning in their walk with God, and today, I’m happy to share an article written by my girls’ friend, Tricia Koechig.
Tricia has been a sweet encouragement to Rebekah and Emily and I’m thrilled to share this space with her today!
Overcoming a Busy Life: Saying NO to the excess and yes to the eternal.
I am a 21 year old senior at a Christian college. I have been overstimulated with multiple career options to choose from and countless organizations to join, as well as an overabundance of activities to be a part of.
The world today is traveling at a break-neck speed towards every possible opportunity that comes into its way. Many people view my generation as always running to the next thing and expending our energy and time on a million different opportunities, rather than focusing on a few specific opportunities that will help us grow instead of burn out.
Why do most young adults my age run towards that busy life of having a hand (or possibly just a finger) in every imaginable outlet and activity known to man?
I believe the reason is because nothing satisfies us. We always want more, and want to do more, because the world saturates us with the theme that our value is equated with how much we can do.
This “be all you can be” mentality has a way of making us run over anything or anyone that is in our way, including those that we love the most.
For Christian college students, it is easy for us to hide this mentality under the guise of
“I’m just trying to accomplish everything the Lord has entrusted me with”
and
“you need to be more understanding of the amount of responsibility and service God gave me to do.”
Though these answers sound all well and good, the irony is that those who make such statements may never have stopped to give Him the glory for those things (that “God has entrusted me to do”).
We can all hide under the protection blanket of “finishing tasks” and “being diligent” and “not wasting our time” and “doing everything to the best of our ability, no matter what the cost”.
As I write this I am sitting on an airplane headed back to Greenville, South Carolina where I attend college. After spending a weekend home, I had a lot of work to accomplish on the airplane and no time to socialize with lost souls around me. The convicting of the Holy Spirit consumes me with this thought: Here I am writing about the busy life and ways to overcome it when I have not even introduced myself to the person sitting next to me. In obedience to the Spirit call, I put down my pen for the remainder of the trip and God worked wonderfully through the simple act of putting my work away.
The man sitting next to me was Roman Catholic. We started with small talk, and the conversation naturally turned toward the Bible and Christianity. He told me that he had never met someone as committed to God and the Bible as me, and I was saddened to hear that. I am so thankful that God brought our paths together so we could spend an hour hashing out what it means to “follow Christ with everything we have”.
He was impressed that I knew about ancient philosophers such as Pascal, Descartes, and others. I was impressed to know that he had read C.S. Lewis (and found him interesting!).
I encouraged him to read the book of John in the Bible. He told me that he would check it out, but that he believed in a general God, and that he would go to Heaven if there was One. I politely disagreed with his viewpoint.
I told him that I knew for sure I was going to Heaven. He still doesn’t believe you can know for sure. The depth and length of our conversation requires me to write very little about our exchange, but I have been praying for this man, Alex, since I met him. I told him that I would pray for him and he would be on my prayer wall and his response was, “Well, we’ll see if it works.”
What if I had kept on writing about the busy life and had come up with a neat outline of “Three Ways to Simplify Your Life”? What if I had started right away on homework for the upcoming week of (seemingly) endless tasks? One thing is for sure: I would have never had the opportunity to live out my faith for a solid hour and dig deep into the “why” behind my beliefs.
Did I say everything perfectly in my conversation with Alex? Absolutely not. However, Alex heard a clear gospel message and saw a life that was committed to following Christ. Talking with Alex did not put me in a better position for the upcoming week, but I am thankful that God allowed me to seize an eternal moment instead of an excess moment.
Homework piles up, duties overwhelm, people manipulate—but all the excess cannot be equated with our eternal calling to proclaim to the lost world the wonderful message of the God’s free gift of salvation.
1 John 2:17 “And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.”
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