One of the defining aspects of modern life is busyness. Our lives are jam-packed with work, school, entertainment, extra-curriculars, groceries, and so on. The spiritual dangers of these demands on our attention have often been noted: ‘If the devil can’t make you bad, he’ll make you busy.’ So what profit can a hyper-busy Christian draw from scripture’s repeated warnings against laziness?

         'Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise'. (Proverbs 6:6)

 

As I sit here writing, I have split my screen between Microsoft Word and the book of Proverbs.  But in the background I also have Kayo open (the Melbourne derby in the Big Bash), Disney+ (an almost finished TV series), the ABC news website, a blood donation booking page, and a car sales website (we’re in the market for a people mover), and so much more. If I pick up my phone there are podcasts (so many podcasts!), music streaming, and WhatsApp. There’s a timer so I don’t forget the burrito in the oven. There’s a notification reminding me to buy petrol soon. There’s a text from my wife asking if I took the TimTams to work (yes).

 

Of course, I’m not doing all this at once. But it’s there, crouching at the door, waiting for me to lose focus on the task at hand. While I tussle with sentence construction it’s so easy to just switch to one of these other tasks.

 

The biblical injunction to consider the ant commends her industriousness and initiative: ‘Without having any chief, officer, or ruler, she prepares her bread in summer and gathers her food in harvest.’  Sitting here, multitasking, certainly feels industrious. After all, we do need to buy a car, and I do need to check that burrito. And yet at the end of the day I feel like the sluggard in Proverbs 26:14: ‘As a door turns on its hinges, so does a sluggard turn on his bed.’  A lot of restless movement, but not a lot of productive labour.

 

This is not meant to be a self-help article about focused work or efficiency. Instead, I want to draw your attention to the ways in which the Proverbial admonition of the sluggard is surprisingly relevant to the over-busy and ever-distracted. In fact, it may be helpful to think of laziness as one of a family of traits including listlessness, boredom, and apathy. The archaic term acedia gathers these characteristics together under one umbrella.

 

The sluggard says ‘There is a lion outside! I shall be killed in the streets!’ (Proverbs 22:13). The man of acedia is never short of justifications for habitual unproductivity. And yet his lack of a fruitful harvest doesn’t mean he’s done nothing; it can take the form of half a dozen projects started but not finished: ‘The sluggard buries his hand in the dish, but will not even bring it back to his mouth.’ (Proverbs 19:24)

 

Proverbs has several reminders about the lazy man lacking food. Most of these criticise the sluggard’s indolence at a time when the diligent man has put in hard work: ‘The sluggard does not plow after the autumn, so he begs during the harvest and has nothing.’ (Proverbs 20:4) But one parallel verse is much more direct: ‘He who tills his land will have plenty of bread, but he who pursues worthless things lacks sense.’ (Proverbs 12:11) The one consumed in worthless pursuits gets just as much plowing done as the sluggard on his bed.

 

To take one example, most of us wish we would read scripture more than we currently do. Our spiritual sustenance comes from time in God’s word (1 Peter 2:2), yet often the reading of scripture gets crammed into the margins of the day, if not shelved altogether.  There aren’t enough hours in the day – yet if we tallied the time spent scrolling social media or watching TV, we’d find there’s time. Our laziness doesn’t take the form of complete inactivity, but rather distraction, consumption, and the pursuit of ‘worthless things’.

Heed the warning of the Proverbs against laziness – it’s not just for the sleepyheads, but the busy, distracted believers too.