CRAZY BUSY
A mercifully short book about a really big
problem
By Kevin DeYoung
Inter-Varsity Press. 128 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978 1 783 590 230
The well-known Christian leader who was to write this article confessed that he was too busy to do it — don’t you love that irony?!
So, I bashed out this quick review next to the netball court while my daughter was playing, after work, and before an evening meeting. Such is life. And it’s because of this that Kevin DeYoung has done us a great service with his latest book.
I will always read anything Kevin DeYoung writes, and so should you. His books are biblical, reformed, sensitive, culturally aware, realistic, fresh and encouraging. Crazy Busy is more of the same, as DeYoung looks at our frenetic world and lives, and urges us to consider what drives us, and how we can and must check our motives to be so busy, and learn to seek rest in the crush of life.
Attitudes and ambitions
This is not a book on time management, or even a book with much detail on work-life balance. That’s fine, there are plenty of other titles on that stuff already. This book explores our attitudes to our ambitions, God, work, our place in the world, and much more. It then looks at areas of our lives which reveal what really drives us, such as how we relate to our children, our attitudes towards leisure, and towards our supposedly time-saving gadgets. Counsel on rest is specific, and challenging. DeYoung’s warning is clear — ‘busyness is like sin: kill it, or it will be killing you’ (p.28).
My own observation of the book is that it is immediately relevant to people in church leadership, as DeYoung’s struggles are so obviously their own. I just fear that those with a secular calling who find themselves always under tyrannical bosses and facing impossible pressures to keep their jobs might be left a little frustrated. Busyness for many is not an idol they love to embrace, but a reality they can’t escape. That’s a slight blemish in the book, but Crazy Busy certainly deserves a wide audience.
This is a book well worth buying, and buying a copy of for each of your church leaders — and then telling them to make time to talk it through together! And then they need to find ways (and time) for helping church members work through its pages and challenges.
