The other day after Sunday School, a friend stopped me and handed me a newspaper clipping of a Dilbert comic. The comic reminded him of me and he made it a point to cut it out and give it to me next time he saw me.
Before the internet, this was how we hyperlinked things.
Now, I’m a technology nut and I think there are many benefits to what technology allows us to do that we couldn’t do before. But, had he emailed me a link to this comic, I probably wouldn’t have thought too much of it. The fact that it was cut out and hand delivered was a little more meaningful, just like we all still enjoy receiving regular mail. Receiving it by hand was much more valuable to me than receiving it by a mouse click.
Then I got to thinking how important my clicks are to me. I read through a lot of news/blogs/articles everyday on the web. Each thing I read through is found with a single click on a hyperlink somewhere during my daily reading. So when I read through something that isn’t very meaningful or doesn’t cause me to stop and think, I honestly feel like I’ve wasted a click.
This isn’t good. I haven’t timed how long it takes me to click a mouse button but I suspect I’d need something better than a second hand to accurately measure it.
I was reading another biography on Jonathan Edwards the other day and found out that his study habits often found him behind his books for 13 hours a day. Now, this 13 hours included his pastoral duties, but it still offers a glimpse into how much time Jonathan spent studying the Word and those who wrote about the Word. But, the biography continued, he never seemed to be in a hurry to do anything. He never seemed as if he had somewhere better to be or something more important to be doing than whatever he was currently engaged in. How many people can we honestly say are like this?
This seems alien to me. Here I am worried about every click of the mouse and whether or not it is a good use of my time and I’m only spending a fraction of my day in the way that I would like to be. It’s difficult not to become so concerned with my time that I make others around me feel like I am unapproachable because I’m too busy.
We read in Ephesians 5:16 that we should make the best use of the time because the days are evil. Paul is referencing an avoidance of a depraved lifestyle in the passage but certainly we can apply this to this situation if I’m living like the world around me. Maybe this is a good time to clean out my feed reader of some unedifying blogs…