As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him.  She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said.  But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”
“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”
Luke 10:38-42 (NIV)

It doesn’t take much to be a Martha these days.  Our days are so filled with “have to’s” and our leisure time with “want to’s” that there is no time left for simply sitting at Jesus’ feet and learning from Him.  We try to squeeze in a quick “quiet time,” but all too often our minds are drawn back to what we have left unfinished, or forward to what we have planned, and we end up spending most of our time just trying to corral our thoughts.

It would be easy to think that it was easier back in earlier times, when life was lived at a much slower pace and TV and the Internet hadn’t been invented yet.  But the testimony of those ages, all the way back to the time of Mary and Martha, indicates that distractions were just as easy to come by in those “simpler” ages as they are in ours.  Even those in monasteries and such ended up having to develop a focused mind and heart when it came to sitting at Jesus’ feet.

So what is the solution?  I think the key is in verse 42, and it revolves around the concept of choice.  Mary had “chosen what is better,” clearly implying that Martha had chosen what was clearly not as good.  But there were no victims of circumstances or schedules here, or even of temperaments.  There was just choosing, based on what was most important to each person.  Martha CHOSE to fill the time of Jesus’ visit with activities that were aimed at Him, but not focused on Him.  Mary CHOSE to spend the time totally focused on learning from Him, no matter how much of the other stuff was left undone in the process; what Jesus had to say was so important that she just put everything on hold for a while.

It is easy to use the excuses “I can’t,” “I had to,” or “I just wasn’t able to” when it comes to our quiet time.  But when all is said and done it really boils down to a matter of choice.  If we really look hard at our days, we find that we spent half an hour doing a crossword puzzle, an hour or two watching TV or surfing the net, or an hour reading a few chapters in our latest novel.  We might even have spent an hour or several doing some “ministry work.”  And then we claim that we had not time to sit quietly at the Lord’s feet, learning from Him.  The fact is, we had the time, but we chose to use it doing something else.

Someone once told me that if we fail to set time aside purely to meet with the Lord on any given day, what we were actually saying is that the LEAST important thing that we DID do that day was more important to us than sitting at the feet of our Savior and Lord, listening to and learning from Him for a few minutes.  That’s something to think about!