It’s that time again – you’ve got about an hour before dinner on Saturday afternoon. What are you going to do?
It all depends on the sort of person you want to be. For we’re all now in the process of becoming who we will be in the future.
So here are a couple of options.
Option 1: Watch TV. Or play Minecraft. Or check your Twitter feed. Or something.
Option 2: Bake a cake. Or go for a run. Or listen to a Beethoven symphony. Or read a Shakespeare play. Or find out how to say hello, goodbye, please, and thank you in Mandarin. Or memorise the first few verses of the book of Obadiah. Or start a sourdough mixture that will still be alive and producing great bread when you have grandchildren.
Again, it all depends on the sort of person you want to be.
To press the point, imagine what might happen if you had that same hour every week for a year. Suddenly option 2 expands quite a lot.
For example, you could learn to paint with watercolours, or write a novel, or read the entire works of Shakespeare, or visit the old people’s home around the corner and befriend some of the residents, or get the address of a child in an orphanage in India (home to 20 million orphans) and write to them every week, or deliver 10,000 evangelistic tracts to houses in the streets around your church, or listen to the entire Bible on my friend David Field’s superb audio recording (website here; Android app here).
Option 1, on the other hand, remains pretty much the same. Watch TV. Or play Minecraft. Or check your Twitter feed. Or something.
It’s entirely up to you, really.
Now fast-forward ten years. What sort of person do you want to be then? Really, it’s up to you.
You could be the kind of person visits the elderly all over your town, writes to orphans all over the world, evangelises your entire parish, runs a mile in 4 min 50 secs, knows how to say hello and goodbye in 50 different languages, loves Beethoven and Shakespeare; paints in watercolours; has written and self-published half a dozen novels, and makes the most awesome sourdough.
Or you could be the sort of person who watches TV, plays Minecraft, and tweets a lot.
You choose.
Really want to grow as an individual, a family, a church? Unplug the television for a year. Amazing how much time we have gained to serve the Lord. Just a thought. Blessings.