The most memorable spiritual lesson I learned in college was actually taught to me by my astronomy professor, Dr. Bradstreet. For years the astronomy students at Eastern practiced the art of lugging telescopes into place, manually calibrating them, and learning how to keep a stellar object in the field of view so it could be traced. The year after I graduated, however, that was all going to change. Dr. Bradstreet was ready to break ground on an extremely ambitious undertaking, the construction of a two dome observatory in place of the outdoor observation deck we suffered on throughout our college careers. Gone would be the February evenings out in the wind and cold. Gone would be the hours spent developing black and white film for our observation notebooks. Gone would be the endless lugging of huge Dobsonian Reflector telescope out of the elevator penthouse, and the often tedious manual calibration of both that and the smaller Schmidt-Cassegrain reflectors (which we carried up the steps out into the cold). The students who came after us would sit in a warm-room, drinking hot chocolate and combining multiple digital photographs for shots we could only dream of taking with our manual camera.

As Dr. Bradstreet remarked on the luxury the next students would be able to enjoy, however, he said something rather provocative, “Of course, upcoming students are going to have to put way more into their notebooks then you guys did.” When my class heard that, there was a collective shudder. The astronomy notebook was the collective nightmare of a majority of Eastern’s first year students. it took careful planning (scheduling observation nights, and planning for the inevitable cloudy sky), technically difficult (we developed our own images), and time consuming (collecting the various data into a visually compelling medium). The astronomy notebook stretched incoming students to the limits of their academic skills. Finishing the notebook was such a glorious feeling for me that I still have mine on my book shelf, and one of my moon-shots hangs in my office. Being so all-consuming, however, made my class wonder how on earth people could expect to put even more it!

Dr. Bradstreet had the answer, “Gang, you have to understand, there is no such thing as a labor-saving device. Every time we create something to save time, it just gives us more time to fill with work. If I gave the students coming after you the same assignment you had, they’d all get it done in a couple days.” His response stuck with me, and has colored my pursuit of ministry ever since. Dr. Bradstreet absolutely had to increase the level of work for the notebook assignment because the strain of putting it together was as much of the lesson as the astronomical facts we learned. If he didn’t stretch his students, he wouldn’t be doing right by them.

As a theological student, however, I learned a lesson about the negative aspects of efficiency that day – one which perhaps pastors all need to learn. The technology we have at our disposal means that we can be frightfully efficient – accomplishing tasks in hours which took our predecessors days to complete. Yet, that efficiency often threatens to swallow us with the overwhelming desire to be ever more productive. If we don’t have a full block of meetings, multiple visitations, and various pastoral functions filling our calendars we tend to feel we’re not doing it “right.” In that way, our labor saving devices tend to make us slaves. In the midst of our efficient pursuit of productivity, we too often forget the tasks which have no immediate return on our investment of time – study, reflection, and prayer (just to name a few). When we forget these things, we reveal that we’ve actually accepted our “labor-saving” devices without counting the cost of using them.

It is because of that lesson that Dr. Bradstreet taught me back in 1996 that I came to the conclusion that if my labor-saving devices have made me so efficient that I’m constantly “busy” I’m probably doing it wrong. Oh, there are seasons of time where busyness is unavoidable and can even be embraced as a chance to grow (ABCNJ’s annual session serves this function for me), but these must be seasons rather than a way of life. If we are to learn from being stretched we need to have seasons of reflection, days where the schedule is empty, and moments where we’re free to simply sit before our Creator and be.

Thanks Dr. B – your impact goes further than you realize!