Hope City Church (Grace Brethren) of Norwalk

Note fromPastor: “Putting Off Procrastination” I’m going to be completely honest: I procrastinate. I’ve been doing it most of my life. If a particular task is even remotely unpleasant, or even pleasant for that matter, my first and persistent tendency is to put it off. It’s not that I’m lazy; I’m actually very busy. I just wait as long as possible to get things done, especially things I’m not particularly excited about. I always pull it off in the end, but it always makes me miserable. Overcoming this bad habit is not about “polishing my halo.” My procrastination is a serious, deep-rooted pathology that negatively affects almost every area of my life, and it only makes it harder to overcome that it happens to be acceptable in our culture. It can become a sinfully prideful way of living very quickly. But the good news is that by God’s grace, over the last few years I have been changing. I would like to share with you the hope I have been given by God to overcome the sin of procrastination. I have always tried to convince myself with the motto: “Pressure makes diamonds.” I would wait till the last minute to finish a big paper in school. I would stay up all night before finals cramming in the information. At work, I would waste time with unimportant busyness and pull off the big tasks at the last possible minute. I had a few “close scrapes,” but I always pulled it out and no one was any the wiser. Marriage only heightened the pressure because now my “crunch times” belonged to my wife too. I had to push her away at times to get last minute work done. I began to drag my feet about our shared responsibilities like praying together, sticking to a budget, washing the dishes, or mowing the lawn. I became very defensive if she ever mentioned my procrastination and the problems it was creating. If marriage is God’s chisel for sanctification, then children only sharpen the edge. The arrival of kids took the pressure up another notch. Now there was even less free time to push off things that needed to get done, but I still managed to pull off most things, but my list of undone to-do’s grew longer. I was continually tired, discouraged, irritable, and feeling sorry for myself. And for the first time, I even experienced a couple of mild panic attacks. I envied my more disciplined friends, but saw little hope of becoming like them. When I became involved in the (truly) biblical counseling movement, I was challenged to allow Scripture to diagnose my problem and set a course for change. What captured my imagination was the biblical metaphor of a tree, and the suggestion that my prickly branches of procrastination were being nourished by unseen roots growing deep in the chambers of my heart. I even hoped that I might uncover the root of my problem and cut it out once and for all. I quickly learned that my hope in finding “a root” was merely my procrastinator’s heart looking once again for a shortcut or a “silver bullet” for my problem. To get to the roots, I had to start with the branches, and I learned two things: my procrastinating habits were systematic, infecting all areas of my life though operating in predictable, orderly ways, and secondly, I am largely ignorant most of the time about how my sinful heart operates. I had always thought of procrastination as an “absence.” I wasn’t working hard enough or soon enough, but it had never occurred to me that if something is absent, then what is present? All of those wasted hours were going somewhere, but what exactly was I doing with them. We shall see where all those hours were going next time as we continue to put off procrastination.