God's Word refers to the Christian life often as a walk, seldom as a run, and never as a mad dash.
Steven J. Cole

In When I Relax I Feel Guilty, Tim Hansel writes of his years as a coach and area director for Young Life: "I would work twelve, fourteen, even fifteen hours a day, six or seven days a week. And I would come home feeling that I hadn't worked enough. So I tried to cram even more into my schedule. I spent more time promoting living than I did living."1

Many pastors know what Hansel's talking about: Long days, short breaks, and the increasing ugliness of being busy, what one called "doing more but enjoying it less."

One jumbled, crowded page on a Day-Timer follows another. One committee meeting leads to another. One sermon is hardly done when the next one looms ahead. A pastor captured the feeling when he described his weekly schedule as "an overstuffed glove compartment."

The husband of one minister felt this frustration when he wrote: "The overwhelming, indeed the single, issue ...