Of Time and Efficiency

One of the traps I fall into is that I can allow weeks to simply become cycles where I repeat the same thing over and over, with little variation. For a few weeks here in November, it seems I have fallen into this rotation a little bit. Part of it is because it has been raining and cold, so no one really wants to do anything when that happens. Another part is because I'm procrastinating.

Transitioning seasons is always tough for me. I prepared hard for the Fall. But I probably should've begun preparing for the Christmas season at the end of October. I'm left here, one week before advent starts without much groundwork for the holiday season for our church. I do have an uncanny ability to finish everything by the deadlines, but I don't like to rely on that. Basically, I didn't get ahead when I could've.

Having talked about my Mondays in the past, I'm at a point now where I'm rediscovering again what I should be doing with it. I've experienced a few Sundays in the last while where I've been completely drained by the time I got home from everything. This could be right after church, or after some evening gathering I went to. So even though I purpose myself to do something productive each Monday, I'm becoming more of a vegetable because I just don't feel like doing anything. When I veg out, I never really feel rested because I'm just doing mindless things. There's no nurturing at all, I just go through the motions until it's Tuesday again, where I dread getting up to go to the office. I need my Mondays to recharge me. But how do you do that when, a) you're exhausted, and b) the weather doesn't make it desirable to go out?

God sustains me everyday. Somedays, it means I make it through with flying colors, whereas others I am barely crawling past the finish line. I don't mind too much, I just need to do better to ready for the next day.

I've also been thinking about the life of an average church goer. The pressing question right now is how much exposure to God and to the bible do people get outside of Sunday? My optimistic guess is 1-2 hours tops. Unless we maintain strong spiritual disciplines of praying, reading, and fellowship, we will feel literally no obligation to have our attentions on God. How tragic. Also, the wrong mind set.

So, with this in mind, I'm feeling pressure to really optimize the time I do have with my church to leave something that will last. The real challenge isn't to impress something that lasts, though. The real challenge is to cause a desire to take time out of everyone's days to spend time with God. How do we do that? Well, I don't really know. I need to be the first to keep myself disciplined, and I completely understand how hard it can be. Doesn't matter that I'm a pastor. It's, in a lot of ways, actually harder for me to keep it up.

So the desire is for us to change our "logic" and attitude to a point where, instead of having no reason to spend time with God, we have no other choice but to spend time with God - that we can't help ourselves but to spend time with him.

It's actually hilarious, one thing that I find. John Piper said something along the lines of how the fact that now with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., (everything that promotes efficiency) the reason we neglect God will never be because of a lack of time. How sobering of a thought is that? I felt like I hit a brick wall when I heard that comment; and then I found myself confessing a bunch of things. Haha.

Well, these thoughts may likely turn into what I preach on for the first half of 2016. I think that would be good for me to learn as well. Time isn't very forgiving to those who choose to not prioritize it: I'm learning that now. And especially with all the... let's go with "stuff" that's happened in the world over the last few weeks, there is no greater point in our lives than now where we need to be making use of time and efficiency correctly.