Enormous Amounts of Material

Time is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of—eh, nevermind.

So, my posting has been sporadic lately—again. It's not that I don't have anything to post about. I've still got a draft of a post on Firefly and "missional Christianity" sitting around, unfinished, on Blogger's servers. And my mind keeps coming back to the post on tradition and Scripture interpretation that I've been meaning to do. Other ideas have floated through my head, generally finding their expressions in a greatly summarized form as comments on other blogs, rather than the posts that I felt they ought to be.

Thing is, I just haven't had the time to sit down and write anything. Between piano lessons/practice, roommates, friends dropping by, my girlfriend, work, and so on, I never seem to have time to just stop. And it's not that I don't enjoy those things; if I didn't, I wouldn't have such a hard time putting them aside for a while and "stopping."

Just about the only time I find that I can really "get away" is either taking a walk alone around Kennesaw Mountain, or going to a coffee shop by myself. Unfortunately, the coffeehouses I know of near me all close around 8 or 9pm on weekdays. That's not a problem, though, when I don't have something I have to do beforehand.

Perhaps I would post here more if 1) I could get into a more regular habit of "stopping and smelling the coffee", and 2) I got a laptop that I could take to the coffeehouse and use to get on the Internet. I'm realizing, though, that no matter how hard I look, I'm not going to "find the time" for this. I need to stop, take a look at my time, how it's being spent, and make the time.

Unfortunately, this will be an uphill battle. It will mean that I will have to say, "no" to hanging out with people sometimes. It will mean that I will have to deal with the fact that some people simply don't understand that taking time to do nothing is just as important to getting things done.

I heard a message on Sabbath rest recently by some guy named J.R. Woodward, in which he pointed out that we have come to a point where we often view a person's value (including our own) in terms of his or her productivity. While this is certainly not an explicit component of most modern attitudes (i.e., it's not obvious), I think we're all probably more guilty than we think. We feel bad if we're not obviously "contributing to society." We often tend to look down on those who are unemployed, because they're not being "productive." We feel guilty if we "didn't get anything useful done today," and we consider such activities as playing video games to be a "waste of time," because we're not "accomplishing anything." Woodward can explain this much better than I can, so, if you want to hear his message (and read some tips on how to make a "Sabbath rest"), check him out here.

And I wrote more than I meant to...there goes my lunch hour...