"Keeping busy?" That is a common question I get from friends and acquaintances. It is not really a question but a greeting. "Keeping busy" is equivalent to "How are you doing?" It's a colloquial way of saying hello.

The assumption, of course, is that it is good to be busy. Actually, the assumption is that it is important to be busy. If you're not busy, you're not doing very well.

Just after college, a friend of mine was looking for a job and sought career counseling. One of the pieces of advice he received from the career counselor was that when interviewing for a job, it is very important to give the impression that you are busy. Above all, the counselor said, "Never say you have a lot of free time."

I suspect that our bias towards being busy comes from some notion that important people are usually busy, so if we're not busy we must not be very important. In the United States we tend to value productivity more than anything else. If you're not busy, you're probably not very productive. If you're not producing, you're not very valuable. At least that's how we're trained to think.

Of course this bias towards busy-ness leaks into our religious life as well. We can easily convince ourselves that God is like the hypothetical job interviewer who is not impressed with leisure. We might think God greets us the same way that my friends greet me --- "Keeping busy?"

In today's Gospel reading, Jesus says something that might astonish those of us trained to view productivity as the ultimate value. "Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest." Jesus calls us to rest. Jesus calls us to be idle. Jesus invites us to relinquish the burden of busy-ness.

This is good news for those of us who harbor the suspicion that all the activity that we commit ourselves to isn't helping us be happy, fulfilled or content. Maybe this is because we've substituted a spiritual value with a cultural value. Our culture values busy-ness. Our culture equates motion with progress. Our religion does not.

"For my yoke is easy, and my burden light," Jesus concludes. I don't know about you, but this is a message I need to hear. I don't think of my life as a Christian as "light." I tend to think of all that I should be doing. Our faith should lighten our burden, not increase it. After all, we have God on our side to do the heavy lifting.

Jesus calls us to rest. Jesus tells us our burden should be light. In the end, we are not called to be productive. We are called to be dependent on the grace of God, not on our own productivity. And being dependent on God means that at least some of the time we must be still so we can listen and learn.

Today's Gospel reading tells us we should be able to say, on occasion at least, that we have a lot of free time. Not because we are lazy, but because we are faithful.

Bill Peatman writes from Napa.