too.
The simplicity of the word does not give it's magnitude justice. The word carries so much weight with so little space.
I use this word a lot. Throwing the adverb into my sentences to help justify my current state.
I'm too exhausted.
I'm too hungry.
I'm too busy.
The last one has challenged me a lot over the past few years. I've written a few posts about busyness and it's place in my life (Stop, and take a breath & Routines). Often times, I use busyness to justify saying no to something else. "I'm too busy to hang out." "I'm too busy to take on another project." "I'm too busy to read my bible."
I think there is a fine balance between the right amount of busyness and too much. Sometimes, saying no to something is absolutely the right move in order to maintain balance in your life. However, I have discovered the hard way that this can't be true for every situation.
In Routines, I wrote this- "Time is expensive, and for that reason, I used to justify not spending time reading my bible because I had other things to do. That busy schedule that I had total complete control over was filled with so many things, that I told myself that there wasn't any time for God in my daily routine."
Those words sometimes still ring true today. It's been a year since I wrote that post but I find myself saying I'm too busy to read my bible and justifying my inaction because it's easier to place blame on my busyness than really figuring out the root of the problem.
I recently finished a book titled "Crazy Busy" by Kevin DeYoung and my favorite quote from the book comes amid my favorite paragraph in the book.
“Making consistent time for the Word of God and prayer is the place to start because being with Jesus is the only thing strong enough to pull us away from busyness. We wont say no to more craziness until we can say yes to more Jesus… It is not wrong to be tired. It is not wrong to feel overwhelmed. It’s not wrong to go through seasons of complete chaos. What is wrong – is to live a life with more craziness than we want because we have less Jesus than we need.”
We can have too much on our plate. We can have too many tasks that need to be accomplished. We can get too little sleep.
What we can't do though, is get too much Jesus. We can never have too much of Him.
Too, while it adds a lot of weight to my sentences when I want it to, can never be used to describe the amount of Jesus I need.