Your Default in our Time Poor World
We have written before about how fast paced our lives have become. In our attempts to cram in more activity we can squeeze out opportunities for God-given ministry. The expression many use is being Time Poor. In the worst case we simply have no time for each other …
The irony though is that every single one of us is given the same allocation of 24 hours every single day! It is then up to us how we use it. Now of course there are constraints put on us: our bodies do require us to sleep, and we have to spend a certain amount of time working (which may then require some time travelling to/from work) and so on. Yet in truth many of us can make choices about how we use at least some of those hours. The question then is ‘Do we choose wisely?’.
A related question is ‘What is our default?’, i.e. the activity we normally plan to do or attend assuming nothing unusual happens or crops up. This question has a bearing on our following of Jesus (our discipleship), since we were never intended to follow Jesus in total isolation, but rather together with others. Since together implies meeting or acting with others, and meeting/acting requires our time to be allocated, you can quickly see how our choice of how we use our time (and our chosen default) has a direct impact on our discipleship and togetherness as a church!
At the Countess Free Church we are conscious of the different calls people have on their time, and so we try to avoid projecting onto people unhelpful legalism or unhealthy guilt regarding our activities. Yet togetherness is important to us, so we purposefully gather together for worship, whole church prayer events, as well as members’ meetings where we celebrate and seek Jesus working among us as a church. This is the component of our discipleship done together on a whole church scale. It is up to each individual disciple to consider carefully how these factor into their personal time budget, and whether they endeavour to make it their ‘default’.