BBC Radio 4 2016-03-05

BBC Radio 4 2016-03-05

I write a daily thought for Lent, in which I’ve been encouraging my readers very simply to take a little more time to pause, and breathe, during their busy schedules.

The other day, though, I received an exasperated note from one of them, a senior teacher in a successful school, who didn’t feel she had a spare moment to call her own during an exhausting day. It did me think: it’s all very well talking about the spirituality of pausing, but out in the real world it can feel very different.

Her experience seems to resonate with a report published this week from Policy Exchange, a think-tank which argues that schools need to embrace more flexible working to stop, in its words, the “shocking waste of talent” that sees women, in particular, leaving teaching.

It’s especially hard, I think, for people serving any great cause - as teachers do - to give or receive permission even to take a break. But it does make me wonder what kind of ‘world of work’ we are modeling to the next generation of leaders, to our school-children, if we can’t find ways ourselves to flourish as we go.

It seems to be a problem right across the board, too; I was working with young leaders last week who’ll be the future of a global consultancy, which helps other organisations to flourish, and one person confessed they'd been getting 3-5 hours of sleep a night for the last six weeks and wondered when - and if - this breathless pace was ever going to end.

If someone like them doesn’t dare to pause, then I wonder who will? Where are the captains of industry who don’t expect to burn themselves out anymore in this self-fulfilling prophecy of a world we are all too busy creating?

And where are the spiritual leaders, for that matter, who aren’t working every hour God sends them either? I know of too many who are modeling in their organisations or churches an unsustainable way of working that puts pressure on everyone to follow suit - to look busy or else. I’m afraid I speak from personal experience, having been away from home for six weekends running. Physician, heal thyself.
Halfway through Lent, then, my mind returns to Jesus, out there for 40 painfully slow days in the desert, before he began his public work. It’s a courageous leader who dares to stop as well as go-go-go. “Learn from me,” he said, “the unforced rhythms of grace.”

It was all very well for him, of course. He didn’t have a smart-phone, for a start. Or the boss from hell. But whoever and wherever we are, today - isn’t there time, if we look with care, to permit each other just the shortest space to pause ... and ... breathe?