Less Spending, More Doing?

I’m going to do something I have never done here before and post a topic before having thought about it more than an hour.  In fact, I have only begun thinking about it 20 minutes ago.  So here goes.

I believe that memory and remembrance is important.  I don’t think we would have the capacity to remember if it wasn’t important in some fashion.  I spent about a year and a half, as I was wrestling with the whole God’s Sovereignty versus Free Will debate, discovering that God is not bound by the time He created.  Not unless He chooses to be.  Now, as someone outside our dimensions of time, how would God see Time?  I believe He would see it, not linearly as we do and not micro-focused like we do, but rather as the whole together.  He must see Time as one might see the numbers on a ruler and not as a tiny insect would see it when it’s skittering across it.  Wouldn’t memory, then, be a glimpse or a scapshot of what God would see. 

I say all that to remind you of a little phrase I keep saying:  “Redundancy rings bells in my head.”   That redundancy wouldn’t work that way if I didn’t remember the first, second, third and so on-th times I’d heard something.   That little phrase I use is just my way of saying that God often brings up the littlest details of something to either tell me something about his character or tell me something about mine.  Some of you may remember some of the redundancy, but that stuff is not what I’m trying to talk about.

What I am trying to talk about is the latest redundant over and over again and again episode.  Actually, it’s a marketing slogan.  A marketing slogan for Home Depot.  “Less spending, more doing;  that’s the power of the Home Depot.”  I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that slogan on TV at work , but its redundancy has rung a bell in my mind.  Sure, less spending is good….if you’re trying to purchase something, and more doing is good….if you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing.  Would if that slogan were used to describe your relationship with God.  Less spending time with Him and more doing things, anything other than getting to know your Creator.  They aren’t even bad things, sin, at all, just not spending. 

I’ve bought into the “Home Depot” mentality. The more doing.  I am awake three quarters of the time in a single day and I spend 8 at work, and 10 watching movies or playing games on my laptop or writing my book or biking to my parent’s house so I can borrow/steal a car to do something at church.  They’re all good things in themselves, but become meaningless if I don’t remember my Creator and listen to Him, read His word and search his scriptures.   Now, don’t get me wrong, I have been mindful of Him while I work, singing and praying as I feel led, but that’s not the same as searching the Word.  In that, I’ve been less than diligent. 

We talk about a tithe, giving a tenth of our money to God, really His money that He gave us to be stewards of.  Have you ever tried to tithe your time?  I tried once and failed.  I’m going to have a dork moment here and tell you that a tenth of a day is 2 hours and 24 minutes.  I believe I’m allowed to have 5 dork moments every day, so I should have two left.  Anyway, 2 hours and 24 minutes might seem like a long time but think of what God could show you in that amount of time.  As I’ve never done it before, I don’t know what it looks like, but I would guess that it’s something like what the apostles were doing on the day of Pentacost.  I think I’m going to try it though.

JA Menter 3

Haven’t most of the paradoxical theological questions arisen from forgetting the nature of God?