"Busy Man" and "You Know Better"

Some spiritual dangers do not announce themselves as rebellion. They arrive disguised as responsibility, ambition, and competence. Busy Man and You Know Better function together as a kind of wisdom pair, diagnosing two closely related distortions of discipleship. One names the problem of distraction. The other names the problem of comparison. Together they expose how easily faithfulness can be crowded out without ever being consciously rejected.

Busy Man is built around a character most of us recognize immediately. Billy is not immoral. He is not reckless. He is successful. He has the kinds of things that signal a life going well. Three stories. Two cars. A swimming pool. And yet the song quietly insists that something essential is missing. “Some broken parts of an empty heart.” The tragedy is not that Billy is doing the wrong things, but that he is doing too many things to notice what matters.

The song’s most haunting line is not an accusation but a warning. “You’re running with your eyes closed.” Busyness is not merely about speed. It is about blindness. Life is being missed, not because Billy refuses it, but because he never slows down enough to see it. The loss is unintentional, which makes it more dangerous.

Chapman frames busyness as a form of spiritual exchange. “You’ve got a lot of nice things there Billy, but they’ve cost you more than you know.” The language deliberately echoes Jesus’ own warning about gaining the world while losing the soul. What is striking is how ordinary the loss looks. No scandal. No collapse. Just accumulation, distraction, and exhaustion.

You Know Better presses the diagnosis deeper. If Busy Man exposes distraction, this song exposes the internal logic that justifies it. The person in this song is watching others, measuring progress, taking notes, trying to determine how hard they need to try. Faithfulness has quietly been converted into performance. Life is now “graded on a curve.”

The warning here is sharper. “God wants our best and not our better than.” Comparison is exposed as a theological error, not just a psychological one. When life is measured against others, truth is no longer the standard. Appearances are. Outcomes are. Relative success becomes more important than actual obedience.

The refrain is almost parental in tone. “You know better.” This is not ignorance. It is a refusal to live by what we already know to be true. The song assumes a catechized listener, someone familiar with Scripture, someone who knows that greatness is defined by service and that the least are called blessed. The problem is not lack of information. It is misaligned ambition.

Together, these two songs form a quiet but devastating critique of modern Christian life. Busyness keeps us from noticing the soul. Comparison keeps us from telling the truth about what faithfulness actually looks like. One numbs us through speed. The other distorts us through evaluation.

What makes these songs especially effective as spiritual songs is that they do not offer quick fixes. There is no technique for slowing down. No strategy for avoiding comparison. The call is simpler and harder. “Take a look around.” “Open up the Holy Bible.” Return to reality. Return to truth.

In the context of For the Sake of the Call, these songs serve an essential function. Obedience does not fail only under persecution or suffering. More often, it erodes under success, activity, and subtle competition. The call is not always abandoned in a moment of crisis. Sometimes it is crowded out by full calendars and quiet scorekeeping.

These songs remind us that faithfulness requires attention and honesty. Attention to what we are becoming. Honesty about how we are measuring our lives. The danger is not that we stop believing. The danger is that we keep believing while running with our eyes closed, telling ourselves we know better, and slowly forgetting what the call was for in the first place.