Wasting time

My kids and I have been playing Lego Star Wars on X-box 360. They have never really been exposed to Star Wars so last weekend we went to Blockbuster and started renting them. We started with the first one, well, not the FIRST one but the first one. You know--not Episode IV which was the first one but Episode I which is the first one. We are now up to the third one which is actually the sixth one which---never mind.

During the course of all this Star Wars watching someone had a question about the colors of the light sabers so my wife Abby googled it and found out that Star Wars has it's own Wikipedia BRANCH appropriately titled, "Wookiepedia." A couple days later, I went to Wookipedia and just for fun looked up one of the planet names---Naboo. WOW!! You would have thought this was a real planet with all of the geographical, sociological, and history information on this Wookiepedia page about an imaginary planet!!

I thought to myself, "what type of losers have the time to think of all this??" (I know--not very Christlike of me, huh) I quickly corrected myself though and realized that I waste plenty of time doing my own stupid things. We all waste time one stuff whether it is golf or the internet, comic books or riding motorcycles, television or sports.

We all waste time in our day but amazingly we never seem to have time for God. We always make excuses or we just just blow Him off. We can barely carve an hour into our week to go to mass much less daily prayer. I'm not throwing stones--I'm the worst at it. And to make it worse, I KNOW the tricks such as have set times for prayer, have a prayerful space etc etc. I seem to fail more days in my prayer life than I succeed though. I'm decent at spontaneous prayer. I consider this blog to be my own sort of prayer. I want to do better than that though. I want to have certain times set aside and say, "These are my times for prayer." I do that but when the time comes I'm doing something else and put prayer off until it's too late.

If I was smart, or maybe not so lazy and undisciplined, I would realize that things would probably be better in my interior life if I talked to God like I should. I had a thought once that if we are supposed to tithe 10% of our income shouldn't we give 10% of our time to God too?? That would be 2.4 hours a day. That's a lot of time!!!! Obviously it would be great if we did, but I would think that monks may not spend that much time in prayer. A little more realistic thought is imagine the world if we just gave 1% of our day to God. One stinking percent equals .24 of an hour---less than 15 minutes a day. Imagine if we all took 15 minutes a day and dedicated it to God in either prayer, scripture reading, spiritual reading or even daily mass (okay--it may last 30 minutes) Imagine!!!

Of course, we could spend that 15 minutes playing X-Box, checking our Facebook, or hitting a little ball into the woods with a crooked stick. As for me, I'm going to spend it wasting time with Jesus.