“So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger.” (Luke 2:16 NIV)
I want you to take just a few seconds right now and think through your schedule for the next couple of weeks. What do you have planned? Where will you go or who will be coming to you? ‘Tis the season. Everyone seems to be on the move and in a hurry. It seems especially true at this time of year, but if you do any driving around Atlanta you know it’s true all the time. We are a people in perpetual motion. We never stop. And strangely, the hours of the day around this city that we designate “rush hours” are the hours when we can barely move at all.
I don’t have any illusion that someday this will all change, that we’ll suddenly decide to quit living this way. Living at full capacity is simply a reality, and honestly it isn’t always a bad thing. There’s energy, a “buzz” about it that can be exciting. Living with intensity and urgency isn’t the problem. My concern is that our urgencies are misplaced. Our hurry isn’t making us better people; it doesn’t seem to bring a greater sense of fulfillment and purpose to our lives. Far too often our hurry leaves us depleted, irritable and exhausted.
About a year ago I had taken my children to school and found myself sitting in a long line of traffic at a very short light. The light stayed green long enough to let three or four cars slip through and then went back to red. Every time that light went to red, so did I. I don’t know why. I was not late for an appointment. I wasn’t being expected anywhere. I just hated being at that light. I hated missing the green and having to wait. Eventually my car crept close enough to the “zone.” Only one car separated me from the light. When the light turned green, the person in front of me didn’t move. I looked and noticed that her head was lowered and she wasn’t even looking at the light. She appeared to be digging around in her purse. Meanwhile the clock was ticking. There was no way I was going to miss that light. I leaned on my horn (but I did that in a very Christ-like way). My hurry made me impatient and irritable- for no good reason.
Charles Hummell says that most of us live under the “tyranny of the urgent.” We are driven by things that seem urgent and demanding, but aren’t really important. We are driven by time, driven by the clock, driven by others’ expectations. Other cultures have some proverbs about how we live in the West. A Filipino proverb says that people in the west live with little gods on their wrists. An African proverb says that Americans have watches but no time; Africans have time but no watches.[1]
The answer to this dynamic is not to be languid and listless in the way we conduct our lives, but to harness that intensity in a worthy direction. If we are going to live with intensity and urgency, I simply want to be intent and urgent about the things that matter. We get a picture of this in Luke’s telling of the birth of Jesus, and particularly in the announcement to the shepherds.
When Jesus was born, there were some shepherds working the night shift. I’ve worked the night shift, and everything seems to slow way down at night. You can’t sleep, but there is a stillness that settles in with the deep darkness. Suddenly, the stillness and darkness is shattered by the shining glory of God and the voice of an angel. The voice tells them good news: unto you is born a savior.
After this brief sermon and a rousing anthem from the heavenly host, the shepherds say to one another “Let’s go and see it.” And then in Luke 2:16 we get an interesting detail. “They hurried off and found Mary and Joseph.”
The word that gets my attention is the word “hurry.” The KJV says “they made haste.” I don’t picture night-shift shepherds as men who frequently hurry in their work. Following livestock in the deep of night is not a career for ambitious type-A people. But at this announcement – unto you is born a savior – they make haste. They rush off. They hurry to Bethlehem.
It seems that there are two ways to live with urgency and hurry in our lives:
One way is an urgency and hurry that comes because we feel pushed and driven. This is a hurry born of fear and arrogance. We’re afraid of what will happen if we don’t meet someone’s expectations, perhaps our own silent expectations that no one else knows about. In addition, there is beneath all of this a kind of arrogance that behaves as if everything depends on me.
The other urgency is where something we desire, something we yearn for, draws us to it. It is an urgency that comes from being pulled toward, not pushed. Mark Buchanan calls this kind of urgency a “Holy Must.” Jesus lived this way. His life was all about doing the will and work of the Father. A Holy Must produces a kind of intensity in our living that isn’t fear driven.
That’s what we see in those shepherds. The announcement of the savior’s birth gave rise to hurry, urgency, intensity. They made haste. They went to seek it out and to see it – and then they went to tell about it.
Knowing the savior, sharing the savior. What could be more urgent?
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[1] These proverbs are quoted in Os Guinness, Prophetic Untimeliness, 28.
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