Although David Lee and Eric Fattah work full time and freedive, you're forgetting that Umberto is a national icon in Italy and does do a lot of travelling. I have exchanged a few emails with him in the past and he is always too busy to say more than a few lines, let along write many posts on deeperblue.
______________
In my mind I do not understand how a person can be very busy??
is he trying to destroy himself- " There is time for everything under earht"
______________
Peter next time when you email Umberto past this to him:
We live in constant tension between the urgent and the important. The problem is that may important tasks need not be done today,or even this week .A person's home is no longer a castle,a private place away from urgent tasks. The telephone breaches its walls with incessant demands.The appeal of these demands seems irresistible,and they devour our energy. But in the ligth of eternity their momentary prominence fades. With a sence of loss we reall the important tasks that have beein shunted aside. We realize that we've become slaves to the tyraanny of the urgent.
Is there any escape from this patter of living?
THE EXAMPLE OF JESUS
On the night before he die , Jesus made an astonishing claim. In his great prayer of John 17 he said to his Father." I have brought you Glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do"
we wonder how Jesus could have talked about a completed work. His three-year ministry seemed all too short.
on the last night ,with many urgent human needs unmet and usful tasks undone,the Lord had peqace, He knew that he had completed the work God had give him
On many occcasion Jesus declared that he did not come to carry out his own plans." I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me ... I i do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught me.. I always do what pleases him" Jn 6:38)
The Gospel records show that Jesus worked hard . After describing a busy day,Mark reports "That evening after sunset the people brought to Jesus all the sick and demon possessed. The whole town gathered at the door,and Jesus healed many who had various diseases, He also drove out many demons( Mk 1:32-34)
On another occasion the demands of the sick and maimed kept Jesus and his disci;es so busy that they were not even able to eat. His family went to take charge of him , cloncluding that he was out of his mind( Mk 3:20-21) after yet another strenuous teaching session, Jesus and his disciples left the crowd and boarded a boat." A furious squall came up , and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped." Throught it all Jesus was sleeping in the stern on a cushion ( Mk 4:35-38) What a picture of exhaustion
Yet Jesus life was never feverish;he had time for people. He could spend hours talking with one person, such as the Samaritan woman at the well( Jn 4) His life showed a wonderful balance, a sense of timing. On one occasion his brothers urged him to go to judea.. Jesus replied," The right time for me has not yet come ; for you any time is right" Jn 7:6)
In the discipline and culture of the spiritual life A.E Whitehama observes," Here in this Man is adequate purpose....... inward rest, that gives an air of leisure to His crowded life. Above all there is in this Man a secret and a power of dealing with the waste-products of life, the waste of pain,disappointment,enmity,death,abruptly cut off, to be a finished life. We cannot admire the poise and beauty of this human life, and then ignore the things that made it"
WAIT FOR INTRUCTIONS
What was the secret of Jesus' ministry? We discover a clue in Mark's report of what happend after a very busy day of teaching and healing wich we first noted. " Very early in the morning while it was still dark , Jesus got up,left the house and went off to a solitary place , where prayed" ( Mk 1:35) He prayerfully waite for his fahter's intructions. Jesus had no divinely drawn blueprint or schedule ; he discerned the Father's will day by day in a life of prayer. Because of this he was able to resiste the urgent demands of others and do what was really important for his mission.
When John the Baptist had preached. Jesus received and urgent message from his close friend Mary and Martha concerning his close friends Lazarus: " Lord, the one you love is sick( Jn 11:3) John records the Lord's paradoxical response:" Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. Yet when he heard that lazarus was sick,he stayed where he was two more days:
The urgent need was to prevent the death of the beloved brother. But the important thing from God's point of view was to raise Lazarus from the dead. So he was allowe to die and his sister to grieve. Then Jesus traveled to Beetahny and also wept with the family. He raised Lazarus, having proclaimed:" I am the resurrection and the life He who believes in me will live,
In both of these situation Jesus'yes to the Father's purpose meant saying no to urgent demands of humand need. For the "man of sorrows... familiar with suffering "( Is 53:3) those frequent decisions must have been extremely painful
we may wonder why our lord's ministry was so short, why it could not have lasted another five or ten years.
. Since Scripture give no answer to these questions, we must leave then within the mystery of God's purposes. But we do know that Jesus' prayerful waiting for the Father's instruction freed him from the tiranny fo the urgent. It gave him a sense of direction, set a steady peace and at the end of his earthly ministry gave him the satisfaction that he had completed the work God had assigned him.
DEPENDENCE MAKES YOU FREE
Freedom from tyrany of the urgent is found not only in the example fo our Lord but also in his promise. In a vigorous debate with the Pharisees in jerusalem,Jesus said to those who believed in him ." If you hold to my teaching,you are really my disciples. Then yo uwill know the truth ,and the truth will set you free..... I tell you the truth everyone who sins is a salev to sin... if the Son sets you free,you will be free indeed( Jn 8:31-32,34,36)
Many of us have experienced Christ's deliverance from the penalty and power of sin in our lives.Are we also letting him free us from the tyranny of the urgent ? In this message he points the eay: " If you hold to my teaching" This is the path to freedom , continuing day by day to meditate on the Scriptures and gain our Lord's perspective.
Prayerfull waiting on God is indispensable to effective service. Like the
time out in basketball game,it enables us to chatch our breath and reevaluate our strategy. In prayer wew learn the truth about God, ourselves and the tasks the wants us to undertake. the need itself,however urgent,is not the call for us to meet it;the call must come from the lord who knows our limitations ,"The LORD has compassion on those who fear him;for the knows how we are formed,he remembers that we are dust" Ps 103"13-14. It is not God who leads us until we bend or break with an ulcer,heart attack or stroke. These largely come from our inner compusions under the pressure of external demands
There are two opposite ways to use our time . One person goes through the day responding mainly to inner compulsions and outward pressures of the moment.Anther has a plan that sets priorities and prayerfully makes decisions in advance. Most of us live somewhere between these two extremes . But no matter where we are on the scalee,progress is possible.
Over the year I have dound that one fo the greatest struggles in the christian life is the effort to make adequate time for daily waiting on God weekly inventory and monthly panning .Yet this is the path to escaping the tyranny of the urgent.
As we hold to the teaching of Jesus and seek his wisdom in the decision we make, he frees us from the tyranny of the urgent to do what is really important.
Nothing substitutes for knowing that on this day at this hour,in this place ,we are doing the will of our Father in heaven . Only then cana we comtemplate in peace so many unfinished tasks . At the end of our lives,whether they are short or long,what could give us greater joy than beeing sure that we have completed the work God gave us to do?
then we can look forward to seeing our Lord and hearing him say "Well done,good and faithful servant! ( Mt 25:21)