Give Me an Excuse...

I went over to Bethany Beach DE this weekend for a retreat with a group of guys from the church.  When I'm away from home and my own bed I mysteriously become a morning person.  When you are only a block and half away from the Atlantic ocean, and you find yourself wide awake at 5:00 AM, get your butt up and go to the beach, because sunrise is about to happen, and you really don't want to miss it.
I arrived on the beach in the gray dawn light, and I was not alone.  There were a few people setting up to fish, and one man with a backpack full of really expensive camera gear, and of course joggers... there are always joggers, reminding the rest of us that we are lazy and out of shape, and that we pretty much lack all discipline because they can get up absurdly early and run, or stay out precariously late and run... but I digress.
The thing that struck me though was that I was the only person on the beach who was just there to watch the sunrise.  I had no ulterior motives, no special gear and no big plans.  I was just there to watch and maybe snap a couple pics with my phone, just to solicit some oohs and ahhs from my instagram peeps.  But my primary reason for being on the beach was simply to witness a quiet, peaceful moment and see something beautiful.  Shouldn't that be enough of a reason?
It actually strikes me quite often, when I'm out walking around in various nature-like places.  We humans seem to love to have some excuse to be there.  I'm guilty of this, I often use the excuse: "it's just good to be out here enjoying nature," to justify wasting several hours fishing, when I don't catch anything.  (When I do catch things, I don't need that excuse.)  But I'm getting this creeping awareness that I shouldn't need a bunch reasons or any expensive paraphernalia to just go outside for a while.  My (our) need for this stems from a woeful lack of internal resources.
This desire, perhaps we could even call it a compulsion, to make excuses, extends beyond the realm of outdoor activities.  We're all familiar with the people who make excuses not to do things, in various settings.  The thing is most of these excuses are just thinly veiled versions of "because I don't want to."
It's not okay to say no to a meeting or something like that, just because.  But maybe it should be.
Busy-ness is attractive to most of us, because it makes us feel like we're getting somewhere and we're being really useful engines (Thomas the Tank Engine stories use that phrase quite a bit for those of you who have never spent any time around male toddlers).  It also gives us a fool-proof dodge when it comes to the rather dangerous and uncomfortable work of self-care and spiritual formation.
My profession is one of the few where you are likely to run into people who will bow out of things because they need some down time.  They call it all sorts of spiritual sounding stuff: sabbath time, meditation, retreat, and such, but what it amounts to is simply "me time."  Now, I'm endorsing that as an idea, but I admit, people who make the excuses can sound downright obnoxious, and I'll also admit that they probably need the excuses, due to the fact that it's not okay in our world, to just say, "no" without giving an excuse.
I'll admit, I would have felt out of place just standing there on the beach in the early dawn, I needed to do something, so I walked, I got some exercise, I made my time productive, and I still got to watch the sunrise.
As did the fisherman, and the photographer and the joggers; but our excuses kept us from actually sharing the everyday miracle of a sunrise with one another.
That's when it dawned on me: our excuses are really things that keep us out of community with one another.
As an introvert, it would have been fairly unimaginable to walk on to a beach with a few other strangers and share our thoughts about the new day, but by virtue of having very little in the way of a visible excuse, I was opening myself up to that possibility, luckily for me everyone else had their thing, and so I got my "me time."  Their busy-ness gave me the excuse not to "interrupt" even with a basic salutation.  They were obviously otherwise engaged, and that allowed me to remain in my personal space.
However, I think we have a problem: losing our ability to form spontaneous communities in the real world.  Thus we need support groups and all manner of social media to fill a void.  The void that has been created by our excuses.
We're too busy, we're not finding value in something or other, things are just not to our liking.  It is becoming nearly impossible to break through the web of excuses, unless you can scare, anger or otherwise manipulate people enough to wriggle through.  Historically the gathering of the community of the church happened at morning, noon and evening for the offices of the day, it gave people the "excuse" they needed to come into the presence of God.  That's not the way things really work these days (a few communities still do it, but even then it's rarely widely attended), all we have left is Sunday morning, and we're losing our grip on that.
The excuses are winning.
And the sun still comes up every day.