Priorities

I'm not sure who first coined the phrase, 'The Tyranny of the Urgent'.

Nor who first drew the distinction between the 'important' and the 'urgent'.

Nor do I even recall when I first had an 'aha!' moment as I understood, in my soul, the difference. Living in the twenty-first century, it seems that we are surrounded constantly by the 'urgent'. Emails, text messages, Facebook status updates, online forums, blogs to follow. The faster one comments or replies, the quicker another incoming message appears. I've mostly resisted Twitter, and hope to continue to do so, since it seems that one could spend one's entire life 'tweeting' (or reading other people's tweets).

When one has children at home, there are plenty of urgent demands, most of which are also fairly important. A baby needs feeding, or changing, and the best thing for all concerned is to meet the baby's demands at once. Gone, thankfully, are the days when mothers were advised to feed only on schedule, and leave the baby screaming if he was hungry at any other time.

There are urgent needs for older children, too. What parent hasn't dropped everything on hearing a piercing yell? Or to race to the bathroom, when their toddler announces, 'I need to pee'? As our children mature, we still structure our time around them and their activities; if combined with work outside the home, lives become even busier. We schedule meetings at school, or church; business dinners; and the endless rounds of shopping, cooking, cleaning up and laundry.

Some new parents remember to schedule a few evenings to relax with friends, or even the occasional 'date-night' with a babysitter left in charge. But as the 'urgent' seeps into every moment of the day, it's all too easy, when finding a spare half-hour, to collapse in front of the television, or scroll through social media. Or perhaps a mindless computer game. Anything to distract our minds from the busy-ness of the day, and the further demands that will no doubt take up our full attention again soon. Clichés abound: the rat-race, the treadmill, the daily grind.

Is this how life should be? Is this 'life in all its fulness' that Jesus promised those who love him?

it doesn't seem that way to me. I'm fortunate - or very blessed, depending on your viewpoint - in that I was able to give up work when our first son was born. When we moved abroad, twenty-five years ago, I started home educating our sons. Perhaps for the first time as a family we had time to pause, to think about the reasons for education, to establish some priorities. We read books together, sometimes for hours. We played family board games. Certainly there were days when we all got caught up in our computers, or 'urgent' tasks, and the boys were often busy with a wide range of activities. But we talked, and we walked, and we pondered, and generally slowed down.

My personal tendency is towards inertia anyway, rather than activity. So I loved this new, more relaxed lifestyle. As the boys grew older, and more responsible for their own activities, I needed to do less and less for them. Cooking and laundry continued of course, but with the help of my many electrical kitchen 'servants', they weren't too onerous, other than in the height of summer when the heat and humidity made anything difficult. 

And yet, how easy it was to get caught up in the online world - to check email every five minutes, to amass Facebook friends, and follow their links, and comment on their updates. To take part in online forums and discussions, answering questions - with the motivation of helping others - and to read endless blogs. There is so much at our fingertips, so much we can read, or learn, without ever leaving the comfort of our computer chairs. The urgent still pounds at our minds, and we don't even realise it.

What is the alternative? Whether working to earn money, or in a supported ministry, or raising a family, or even retired... is it possible to push aside most of the urgent demands and focus on what is important? How do we even discover what IS important? How can we prioritise our days? And if we do - if we start with the important, and then flesh out our lives with the urgent, how do we avoid burnout?

Jesus told us, nearly 2000 years ago, that we should love God, and love other people. We've heard this so often that it doesn't seem particularly radical any more. The first century people - mostly Jews - who heard this, were used to having to follow hundreds of regulations in the hope of meeting God's approval. Laws about hygiene, about eating, about what they could do on the Sabbath... some from Scripture, some rules established by their leaders. Jesus said that love was more important than any of them.

As Christians we don't worry about whether switching on a light is 'work' or not. We don't spend our days having to refer to hundreds or minor rules, in case we offend God. Instead, we get caught up in hundreds of distractions that don't, in themselves, lead us away from God, but which frequently make us forget about God altogether.

Love God. That's what matters. Do what we know God wants us to do, avoid what we know God does not want us to do. Tell God when we mess up, ask for forgiveness, make reparation if necessary, and move on. Listen for the voice of God, and follow our inner promptings. Take time during the day to pause, and reflect, and know that we are loved. Easier said than done, of course. 

And love other people. Our 'neighbours' as the older translations of the Bible put it. Our fellow human beings. Relationships should always be our priority. Not schedules, or organisations, or rules and regulations, but people.

For those who are married, the first priority (after God) must be their spouse. Children or work commitments may give more urgent demands, but it's vital to spend time with the person we promised to love for the rest of our lives. Having to schedule a 'date-night' just to hang out and talk is a little sad - we should be communicating and hanging out together regularly, at home. But if the 'urgent' demands of other people in the home make that difficult, then it's probably a good idea. God gave us our husbands or wives as companions, lovers, friends. There is no more important human relationship.

Children - if we have them - are next. We bring them into the world, and must guide them, encourage them, hug them, spend time with them, and - eventually - let them go.

Parents, friends (on or offline), next-door neighbours, colleagues, needy acquaintances, people on the supermarket checkouts, beggars in the street... all these are people whom we are also supposed to love. And since we don't have the time or emotional energy to deal with all of them every day, then we must listen to God, trusting each day - each moment - that we will know where we are to be, whom we should relate to, what we should do.

I wrote the bulk of this post twelve years ago, and couldn't find a way of concluding. I've updated a little, to take account of the passing of the years. But I don't know that I've got any better at working out what's important. There are fewer 'urgent' demands on my time, but more ways to get distracted.  

I read recently a helpful distinction between what's primarily important in general terms (love God, love other people), what principles we should always follow (truthfulness, generosity, kindness and so on), and what specific things each individual should be doing, day by day - and it's the last one that will vary from person to person. But it's also the hardest thing (in my view) to determine .

When I turned 50 I quipped that I still didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up.  More than a decade later, that's still the case. 

Rules, Regulations, Laws and Principles

Chatting with a friend, nearly a decade ago, the topic of rules came up. She said that the one thing that made her uncomfortable with the Harry Potter books was the way that the 'good' guys seem to break rules regularly, and never suffer any kind of consequences. My comment was that this is pretty common in the British 'school story' genre in general. There's an understood difference between rules (which are fine to break, at times, so long as one is prepared for possible retribution) and general principles of loyalty and sportsmanship, which should always be adhere to.

I put this down, at first, to growing up in British culture where we see almost everything in shades of grey rather than strict black vs white or right vs wrong. In many cases, the ends justify the means, in my view. So if Harry and his friends sneak out at night under the cloak of invisibility, knowingly breaking school rules, it's fine from a moral standpoint, because they are doing it for a higher purpose: seeing a lonely friend, or rescuing a condemned animal, or finding something out that will save many lives.

I then started pondering on the differences between rules and laws. Googling the two suggests that the difference is essentially in the consequence of breaking them: lawbreakers may end up in jail, or with hefty fines. Rule-breaking is less of a problem. Other definitions are perhaps more helpful: a law is something passed by the government of a country for the protection of the people. Rules are for specific situations, more arbitrary and may much more easily be changed.

We don't always distinguish them so clearly; we talk about 'rules of the road', for instance, when we're referring to laws governing the behaviour of drivers. And yet there's a sense in which they are arbitrary. It's a convention to drive on the left (or right) of the road, to stick to specific speeds in different situations, to overtake on one side rather than the other. 

These rules are drawn up for the safety of the drivers, but on occasion it might be safer to drive over the speed limit (if a dangerously fast driver is too close on a motorway and there's no way to move), or to drive on the wrong side (if an out-of-control driver is weaving around the street where you should be, and nobody else is coming). The principles of safety and avoiding accidents are more important - at that moment - than the official rules.

And that's a third abstract term, one I referred to in the first paragraph: principles. In most cases there are no laws or rules saying that people should be kind, or loyal, or generous. We could call these things morals or ethics. They may come from Christian or other religious beliefs, or from general humanitarianism. I believe they are part of the 'law' which the apostle Paul spoke of as written on everybody's hearts (Romans 2:13-15).

I take as a starting point that there are broad 'good' principles which we are all aware of intuitively from an early age. Parents are expected to be loving, to provide for their offspring's needs, to comfort them when they are hurt. A toddler knows when something is 'unfair', or when another child is 'mean' (even if he, in his turn, is equally unfair and mean; toddlers are, after all, naturally self-centred). Jesus summed up the Jewish law in two overriding principles: love God, and love other people. 

I have written at length about how so many Christians seem to ignore these commands. I wonder if this may be due to the confusion between principles, laws and rules. Love is an overriding principle. Loving God, doing good and keeping healthy are the main reason for most of the original laws and commandments in the Hebrew Bible.

But not everybody likes following general principles. There are those who want to know exactly how far they can go before they are veering away from it. What does it mean to keep the Sabbath holy, or not to bear false witness? Thousands of tiny rules and regulations were drawn up by priests, in Old Testament times, to ensure that the Sabbath was kept holy and free of work. Jesus blew that apart: the Sabbath was supposed to be a day of rest, to remember God; not one of worrying about whether or not it was 'work' to pick a grain of corn, or heal a man's hand.

When we have small children, we have to make specific rules to keep them safe. A two-year-old might be told he must NEVER go into the street without holding an adult's hand. Do we really mean 'never'? Of course not. By the time he's five or six, he will have learned to be more careful. Perhaps, on quiet minor streets, he is permitted to cross by himself. By nine or ten, depending on his awareness, he may be free of street-crossing rules. They are there to serve a purpose, to protect the child; they may be queried at any time, and may be discussed or changed as the child matures. Rules are not absolutes, nor are they guarantees of safety.

Back to the fictional Hogwarts school situation: in any institution there must be general principles of care for others. So it makes sense to have rules about not running in busy corridors, for instance, or curfews at boarding schools, to ensure all students are safely indoors at night. In order that all students are able to study and learn as they wish, it makes sense for teachers to expect quiet conditions with students sitting in their places during lessons. Some schools allow more discussion than others; a few have the freedom to attend or not attend classes.

However, these are all rules - guidelines for behaviour, to enable everyone to learn. They are not laws; nor are they principles. The main principle at stake here is one of respect for everyone else. There are greater principles too; if somebody collapses suddenly, or has a fit, it would be entirely appropriate for a student to run as fast as possible through the corridors to fetch help, or to call out to get the teacher's attention.

Rules are not 'made to be broken', as the old saying has it; but they are subject to higher principles and guidelines. A child raised in a loving, respectful and open home will know when to query rules and when it's appropriate to put them aside. They should also start to assimilate the guiding principles of morality: it's not just against the rules to take things from Mum's purse or Dad's wallet, it's morally wrong to steal in general. 

There's a law against stealing, in almost every country, with legal consequences for those who are caught contravening the law (in some cases quite harsh). The law forbidding stealing is an example of the principles of ownership - of being entitled to one's property. However, that should balance the principle of generosity - that those who have a lot should find ways of sharing or benefiting those who have nothing. If the principle of love for other people was fully understood and observed, we wouldn't need laws (although rules, in some circumstances, would still be needed).