Friday, July 13, 2012

Big, Fat Timewaster

I am guilty as charged and feeling convicted. I've been wasting my time, and I, of all people, have little time to waste. In about 7 weeks, we will welcome our 6th child and my 3rd son into our family, and there's only about a gabillion things to do before then. There's the normal, every day, taking-care-of-the-basic-family-need things, there's the it's-summer-and-we-want-to-have-some-fun things, there's the projects that I've committed to (that might end up with me being committed), the meetings and the planning for next year and the getting ready for baby things. That sounds like a lot - and it is - but I really do have the time for it if I exercise a smidgen of self-control and stay off the stupid Internet! I could blame Pinterest and interesting blogs for increasing my project list, but that would be false - they are great tools if used correctly. I could blame Facebook and people posting about their lives, but who makes me sign on? And it's important to me to keep in touch with friends and family, which Facebook allows me to do with relative ease. I'm very tempted to blame the singular game on my iPhone for spending so little time reading and knitting, but really - I'm the idiot that installed the thing. No, the fact of the matter is I am choosing to fritter my time away on things of less importance because I don't want to invest the time and energy on the harder jobs.
Some might say I need to step back and re-evaluate my commitments and see if there's anything I'm trying to do that is best laid aside for now. That might be necessary, but for now, I can see the problem, and the problem is the lady in the mirror. I think what she really needs is a good stern talking to ("What do you think you're doing? You've got more important things to be spending your time on than beating your high score on Bejeweled Blitz 2!"), some prayer and repentance (my time, my life, is not my own, since I was bought with a price), and the practice to continuously choose to weigh the options of how I spend my time. I do not have the luxury of going into autopilot - I need to be fully here, exercising wisdom and making good decisions.
I know I'm not the only one who deals with this - I suspect it is a common temptation in this time and culture. My question now is Who else is noticing this trend in their own lives? and What are you gonna do about it?