Crazy Busy By Kevin Deyoung
How I found this book:
I found this book while noodling through my Facebook feed when a book review for “Crazy Busy” floated by me from The Gospel Coalition. I felt that clearly this was the book I needed.
In retrospect it’s quite ironic to be taken by the title Crazy Busy when idling on Facebook, but that is what happened.
What I liked
- It was honest – very honest
- It wasn’t the fix or the answer to busyness (and didn’t try to be)
- It was hyper realistic and aware of the pressures of life and in our day
“Crazy Busy”, while it is a book on busyness, isn’t a 12 step implementable matrix for eliminating busyness from your life. Rather I found it to be a healthy reflection on the busyness of life.
DeYoung worked to strike a balance between our lives which simply WILL be busy and our need for rest. He found common ground with me as a reader as he worked through areas that draw against our limited bandwidth:
- Our pride,
- Servanthood,
- Technology (web/social/television).
My copy is damaged. With my reading style that is a sign of enjoyment, I’m very guttural like that. I resonate with cultures that belch after a meal to show a deep felt appreciation. If you follow the Church’s twitter (@transcendchurch) you’ll doubtlessly have seen tweets that are DeYoung quotes. Some of the quotable sections that Transcend Church tweeted were:
“By all accounts, we are sleeping less than ever before”
“The average American gets two and a half fewer hours of sleep per night than a century ago”
“But getting to the place where my conscience can rest has been a process”
Deep Calls to Deep
In my favorite chapter “Deep Calls to Deep” DeYoung States:
“Cultivate a healthy suspicion toward technology and ‘progress’ I’ve already said that technology improves our lives in many ways, so I’m not suggesting we renounce anything with an on/off switch (though that would make your flight attendants happy). But we could do with a little more ‘distance’ from technology, a little more awareness that there was life before the latest innovations and there can be life without it. Neil Postman’s admonition is wise: technology ‘must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things.’. We must understand that ‘every technology – from an IQ test to an automobile to a television set to a computer – is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing and that therefore requires scrutiny, criticism, and control'”.
