A thought by John Mark Comer from his
book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry (p. 72). The Crown Publishing
Group. Kindle Edition. (Click on the book title to go to Amazon.com to buy
the book.)
Time, it’s so important how we use it,
isn’t it?
He says, “Apparently, I’m known as a ‘reader.’
I read two or three books a week, which normally comes in at around one hundred
and twenty-five books a year. And I feel pretty good about that. At least I
did. Until I read Charles Chu’s calculations. The average American reads two
hundred to four hundred words per minute. At that speed, we could all read two
hundred books a year, nearly twice my quota, in just 417 hours.
“Sounds like a lot, right? 417? That’s
over an hour a day. But can you guess how much time the average American spends
on social media each year? The number is 705 hours. TV…2,737.5 hours.
“Meaning, for just a fraction of the
time we give to social media and television, we could all become avid readers
to the nth degree. Chu lamented:
‘Here’s
the simple truth behind reading a lot of books. It’s not that hard. We have all
the time we need. The scary part—the part we all ignore—is that we are too
addicted, too weak, and too distracted to do what we all know is important.’
John says, “If this is true of reading,
how much more is it true of our lives with God?
“What else could we give thousands of
hours of our year to?”
He goes on, “In twenty minutes of Candy Crush on our morning bus ride, we could pray for every single one of our
friends and family members.
“In an hour of TV before bed, we could
read through the entire Bible. In six months.
“In a day running errands and shopping
for crap we really don’t need, we could practice Sabbath—an entire seventh of
our lives devoted to rest, worship, and the celebration of our journey through
God’s good world.”
Ephesians 5:15–16 (ESV) says, “Look
carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of
the time, because the days are evil.”
John then says, “Every day is a
chance. Every hour an opportunity. Every moment a precious gift.
“How will you spend yours? Will you
squander them on trivial things? Or invest them in the eternal kind of life?
Yes, yes!
Good questions for us to answer, aren’t
they?
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