Busy?

If you have too much to do, with God's help you will find time to do it all.
– St. Peter Canisius

I hear this word all week long from people.

"You don't know how busy I am."

"I'm too busy for that and I know you don't understand."

And I always wonder why they are telling ME that. Because I am busy too - perhaps busier than many of them! The assumption that , because I am a person with a disability, I don't understand what busy is - baffles me. One has nothing to do with the other.

However, a better question for those of us who are Catholics often is "What are we busy doing?"

When we turn down service work because we are too busy, are we really saying we "need" more lesiure time? Or are we so busy that we need that time to do other fruitful, worthwhile things?

It's a good question. Our world seems consumed by leisure activities at times. I hear people say they need to watch a certain TV show, for example, and that they deserve to relax. But it is necessary to look at whether we rationalize avoiding doing service work with this kind of reasoning if we overindulge in leisure activities to the exclusion of doing service work.

I'm wondering how many people can honestly say they can't find an hour once a week to do something for someone else? If not, once every two weeks? Or once a month?

We are all busy. Yet somehow when I take on service work, God finds the time for me to get everything else done. Sometimes it's amusing to sit back and watch the ways He makes it happen! One job I had to do just went away this week-
and it was through no doing of my own - after I stuck my neck out to take on some service work I felt called to do.

But if you stop and think about it, if I am doing what God wants me to do with the time I have down here on earth, then I'm not too busy after all - ever.