Monday, January 13, 2003
MY Time
Once again the Screwtape Letters have hit me in head with a most relevant point. The twenty first letters talks about how the man is very easily irritated when he believes that time which he had counted on being able to spend as he pleased is taken away from him. Screwtape encourages Wormwood to keep the man believing in the concept that his time is his own.
For me this really ties in with one of the practical ways I've been trying to honour my parents more. See, Saturday mornings my mom often wakes me up to go shopping, and almost invariably I get irritated and go back to sleep because I consider Saturdays my time to sleep in. Not only does that attitude demonstrate selfishness--putting my own comfort above serving my mother--but it also encapsulates that wrongheaded thinking that "my time is my own".
The problem with that type of thinking is that it's not true at all! As Screwtape points out, time is a gift given to us, not something that we can take hold of or command. It's like that email forward that went around a while ago: you are given a million dollars, but it is only yours for one day, after which time whatever's left will be taken away. Obviously you'd go out and spend all of it before the day's done, right? So the point was that we should treat our time like the million dollars--at the end of the day whatever's not used will be lost forever, so we have to make the best use of it while we have it. Funny how that forward has stuck in my mind for all this time, even though I haven't done much about applying the moral/message to my life.
Anyway, I wonder if understanding that my time is not my own, but a gift from God, will help me to stop wasting my time and procrastinating so much?
Once again the Screwtape Letters have hit me in head with a most relevant point. The twenty first letters talks about how the man is very easily irritated when he believes that time which he had counted on being able to spend as he pleased is taken away from him. Screwtape encourages Wormwood to keep the man believing in the concept that his time is his own.
For me this really ties in with one of the practical ways I've been trying to honour my parents more. See, Saturday mornings my mom often wakes me up to go shopping, and almost invariably I get irritated and go back to sleep because I consider Saturdays my time to sleep in. Not only does that attitude demonstrate selfishness--putting my own comfort above serving my mother--but it also encapsulates that wrongheaded thinking that "my time is my own".
The problem with that type of thinking is that it's not true at all! As Screwtape points out, time is a gift given to us, not something that we can take hold of or command. It's like that email forward that went around a while ago: you are given a million dollars, but it is only yours for one day, after which time whatever's left will be taken away. Obviously you'd go out and spend all of it before the day's done, right? So the point was that we should treat our time like the million dollars--at the end of the day whatever's not used will be lost forever, so we have to make the best use of it while we have it. Funny how that forward has stuck in my mind for all this time, even though I haven't done much about applying the moral/message to my life.
Anyway, I wonder if understanding that my time is not my own, but a gift from God, will help me to stop wasting my time and procrastinating so much?
