Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Virtue in Wasting Time

...making the most of your time, because the days are evil (Eph 5:16).

Laziness is no virtue, but neither is the harried pace of our present-day. As always, Carl Trueman is provocative and insightful with "On the Virtue of Wasting Time."

For obvious reasons, I especially appreciated this line (taken slightly out-of-context):
I suspect Luther's table companions learned more about life and ministry while drinking beer and having a laugh with the Meister than in the university lecture hall.
I would concur that you may learn a lot by "having a laugh with the Meister"!

More seriously, I personally have found Trueman's concluding exhortations true:
[L]aughter in the face of adversity and hardship not only being vital in this regard but also, of course, an almost exclusively social phenomenon that requires company; drinking beer with friends is perhaps the most underestimated of all Reformation insights and essential to ongoing reform; and wasting time with a choice friend or two on a regular basis might be the best investment of time you ever make.
Let us rejoice that on that Day, we will not exalt our action-items, but in the Accomplishments of the Savior and may that move us to take a moment to relax with some friends to encourage one another in Him.