Sirach 11:11-12. "There is a man who works, and toils, and presses on, but is so much the more in want. There is another who is slow and needs help, who lacks strength and abounds and poverty; but the eyes of the Lord look upon him for his good; he lifts him out of his low estate". These verses are preceded by a warning not to "busy yourself with too many matters; If you multiply activities you will not go unpunished". (Sirach 11:10).

Sirach is telling us to stop trying to do everything ourselves, and instead rely on God. How guilty I am of busying myself with too many matters! God is not keeping score of how many things I do. In fact, He wants me to stop doing the things I have taken on that He is not asking me to do. These can be things that take a lot of time, like activities and volunteer services, but they can also be all the things I put on my to-do list every day that seem so important, so essential to get done, and then cause me anxiety and worry when I do not get to them. That is me being "punished" for multiplying my activities.

God does not reward busyness, He wants and rewards reliance on and trust in Him. When I was feeling very overwhelmed a few years ago, I reverted to my "safety net" of making very detailed lists of things I had to do - long-range, short-range, and immediate. I would get to the end of many days during that period and find I had made no headway at all on the long-range list, and often none on the short-range list. Only the immediate was getting done. But God gave me a peace I had not felt before. I trusted that if I took care of the immediate, because that was all I could do, He would help me with the rest. I found that, amazingly, some of the long and short-range items simply resolved on their own, some in the most miraculous ways! The time to do the ones that didn't resolve opened up exactly when it needed to. I also found that once I plodded through the overwhelming times, my attitude had changed to the point that I did not feel I had to fill every waking second with being productive, which helped me listen better for what God wanted me to do. It turns out that was often very different from what I had on my to-do list!

None of this is to say I am completely over this tendency towards busyness, I still lean that way and have to resist it. This is a good reminder today for me that I need to let the eyes of the Lord look upon me for my good when I feel I lack the strength to do all I think I need to do.