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The Addiction of a Busy Life

The Addiction of a Busy Life
By Edward England
Aviemore Books. 160 pages. £5.99
ISBN 1 901387 09 7

Devastating heart attacks radically change the lifestyle and attitudes to life of those who survive them. In this book, Edward England movingly takes us through his own life-threatening experience and shares twelve lessons he has learned from it. His concern is to get through to those of us whose addiction to busyness might threaten our physical wellbeing, as well as our marriages and other relationships.
It is a gripping book, brilliantly written. We owe the author a great debt in opening up to us his innermost feelings and reactions as he went through his traumatic experiences, and I found the book almost impossible to put down.
Each brief chapter finishes with a summary sentence of the lesson taught from its contents, and these are helpfully listed at the end of the book e.g.: 'God speaks to us through our bodies. I am not indispensable. Live within the limits. There is more to life than increasing its speed.'
The book comes highly recommended by Rob Parsons and Dr. Michael Green, and I am therefore extremely reluctant to inject even the slightest negative comment. However, as I read through the book, a number of questions came into my mind - and that is one of the great values of this book. It is thought-provoking.
'Does Scripture encourage self-love?' I kept asking myself. Are not the Law and the Prophets summarised in only two commandments, not three; for God knows we all love ourselves? I thought of those who have risked their lives for the gospel, and of what Jesus said to Peter when he tried to divert him from the cross, teaching us that Satan can also speak to us through our bodies. I thought of how our Lord would not listen to his family when they thought him mad because of his pace of life.
And then I thought of so many of us evangelicals to whom our family has become our god, while the work of God languishes; of those to whom the search for experiences of God has taken over from service for God. The concept of sacrifice seems to have fled from many of our minds, and yet nothing less constitutes 'reasonable worship'.
So the last chapter of the book came as a huge relief. Its lesson? 'Don't commit the crime of living life too cautiously.' Amen to that!

Malcolm Jones,
Crockenhill