If you're too busy to pray, you're too busy

Driving home past 10pm last night from a concert, I passed a church on a very busy street. As many churches do, it has posted a witty "proverb" to stimulate the thoughts of rushing commuters. "If you're too busy to pray, you're too busy".

This is definitely me, this month. I feel like I am currently at mile 18 of a marathon and I am running out of steam. No amount of GU or gatorade is going to help me at this point, it is all fight or flight.

I know that exercise and eating right will help fight illness and fatigue, but where does sleep and low stress play into it? Where is the happy balance of those four things in the midst of complete chaos? Perhaps it IS in prayer. Perhaps the fatigue and illness are God's way of intervening in a life of busy nothingness, pushing us to idle everything. So why is it that I (we?) ignore sickness, stress, restless sleep, eating habits and forsake exercise and press on in our busy life of activity? Is it because when we truly have the time that we feel overwhelmed by the void of inactivity?

How can we change the world if we are so busy that we let it overwhelm us?

In the vast expanse of internet, the google search "busy prayer" gets over a million hits, but this link was just the answer, for right now.

Prayer for a Busy Day
In the midst of this most busy day,
I want to offer to you, most patient Spirit of God,
the poverty of my time. I always feel so rushed
and pressured, and it sometimes seems as if I think
that only the hours of this one day are limited.
Yet I forget that the hours of a lifetime are limited too.
So please slow me down, you patient God,
and help me to be aware that every moment is precious,
and that the sum total of my moments
on this earth are limited and so to treasure them
each and every one.

-- from the sermon " In Praise of Poverty"
by The Rev. Margaret B. Gunness.