Table Talk – Tyranny of the Urgent
When Charles Hummel wrote his classic essay “Tyranny of the Urgent,” in 1967, he identified the telephone as among the worst offenders against our peace and complacency. And that was before we carried the offending instrument with us everywhere and embellished it with email, computers, cameras, downloadable ring tones and music files.
The issue, Hummel said, is not so much a shortage of time as a problem of priorities. Or, as a cotton mill manager once told him, “Your greatest danger is letting the urgent things crowd out the important.”
The essay does not offer three, five or ten bullet-points of a program to get our priorities back in order. Instead it points to the Gospel accounts of Jesus who never seemed to be in a hurry, even when his friend Lazarus was dying.
Quoting Mark 1:35, Hummel saw the secret of Jesus’ life and work for God in that “He prayerfully waited for His Father’s instructions.” The headline for this section reads “Dependence makes you free,” and Hummel quotes P. T. Forsyth, “The worst sin is prayerlessness.”
Hummel encourages us to look at the endless list of activities in our lives and also make a list of the truly important things we want to do or be. He invites us to eliminate the time wasters and the unimportant and to pursue the really important things.
If you were able to eliminate some of the urgent things that crowd your schedule, what important things would you want to add?
Share your thoughts with the rest of us.
