Part I: “Cut Me Some Slack!”

It’s Monday morning.

You’re up, but that’s about all. There are five different things you were supposed to do last week that are all staring you in the face. School work. Chores. Projects incomplete. So what do you do? Just thinking about it makes you tired. So you decide to take a break, finish that novel, or maybe catch up on your sleep. You can hit everything hard later this afternoon.

Yeah, right.

It’s called procrastination. And it gets everyone some time or another. But when it moves in to stay, when it becomes a part of your character, part of your personality, you, my friend, are a slacker, or what the Bible calls a sluggard. You are just plain lazy, or, to use the old English term, you’re a sloth.

“A sloth is a tropical mammal that lives much of its life hanging upside-down from tree branches,” writes John Ortberg. “When obliged to descend to the ground, sloths crawl along a level surface at the rate of ten feet a minute. Sloths are generally sluggish and inactive; they build no nests and seek no shelter even for their young. They sleep fifteen to twenty-two hours a day, rising in the late afternoon to eat whatever leaves may be close at hand. Being so passive, they are virtually untrainable, although occasionally you’ll find one working as a denominational official or on a roadside construction crew.”

The deceptive thing about procrastination and sloth is that it is not really a matter of being tired. It is a matter of being rebellious. The sluggard lacks energy only for those things he doesn’t want to do. As one Proverb puts it, “The lazy man does not roast his game.” (Prov. 12:27).  In other words, he loves to hunt, but he’s too tired to cook his prey.

Again John Ortberg comes through with one of his zingers: “In the past I would have considered anything but sloth to be one of my problems because I seem to be so busy. Sloth doesn’t necessarily mean we’re doing nothing. Sloth is the failure to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done—like the kamikaze pilot who flew seventeen missions.” The problem is not with energy levels; it is with obedience levels.

Jonathan Edwards, the preacher of The Great Awakening in the early 1700s, had much to say about time management and especially about the sin of procrastination. In a sermon entitled “Procrastination OR the Sin and Folly of Depending on Future Time”, Edwards quotes Proverbs 27:1. “Boast not thyself of tomorrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.” He then elaborates on the fact that procrastination always assumes that there will be ample time in the future to do whatever is necessary. Experience sadly demonstrates how wrong this assumption can be. Teens are adroit at recognizing the sin of procrastination in their parents. “Dad never gets around to doing what he promised me.” But like their parents, they have difficulty seeing the same sin in their own lives. “I’ll do it! I’ll do it!, Why does Mom always have to be such a nag?” This is because we always have good reasons for putting things off until later. It’s just so easy to justify our lack of action in light of our special circumstances.

The hazards of procrastination can only be avoided by intentionally setting our hearts on making the most of the time we have. That means we have to practice some level of time management—not necessarily the level that business people typically use, but something simple that keeps us moving in the right direction and calls us back when we begin to drift away.