This post comes from my friend Jack Hoey III. Jack is one of the creative geniuses behind much of what we do at Seacoast. I always enjoy his insights and I believe you will as well. Here is a post that he wrote with a different spin on wasting time.

How much time do you intentionally waste each day? Honestly, probably not enough. I started thinking about this about a year ago. I was talking with a friend at work about a mutual interest: video games. He mentioned that some of our coworkers were giving him grief (again), helpfully pointing out that video games are “a complete waste of time.” A lot of people who don’t play video games seem to feel this way and while I do not particularly appreciate the sentiment, I do understand it. Things that do not interest us always seem like a waste of time. I suppose that if we were to fill our lives with things that did not interest us, that probably would be a genuine waste of time.

I wonder, though, how many activities can actually objectively be labeled as wastes of time regardless of who is doing them. Does watching a football game have any more intrinsic value than playing a video game? If I play a video game for two hours and you watch a football game during that time, which of us spent their time better? It seems silly to me to try and assign an objective value to either of those things. What frustrates me is that people try to do that anyway. Does everything I do need to have explicit value? Is mere enjoyment not enough to justify playing a video game or watching some football?

The desire to avoid “wasting” time reveals our culture’s utilitarian approach to virtually everything we do. The thinking is this: everything we do should have some sort of obvious benefit that will somehow further our lives. That desire isn’t necessarily bad, but in my experience it often leads to people rejecting certain activities because they don’t see the explicit value. People often describe video games or fiction or some movies as “escapist.” They use the term derisively because they view those things as an attempt to avoid reality. J.R.R. Tolkien, in his essay, “On Fairy Stories” rejected this view. He wrote, “Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?” We all do this. We all have something that we do to relieve the stress and strain of life. We live in a broken world and need something to distract us from the darkness that surrounds us.

Author Umberto Eco once suggested that we make lists “because we don’t want to die.” Life has a limit, but lists do not. When we make a list we are writing out unlimited potential. I think that our desire to find obvious and tangible “value” in everything we do is rooted in the same desire and fear. We want to believe that our lives have meaning and importance. So, if we can fill our lives with things that seem important, we must be important also. If we see someone doing something that we do not see value in, it must be a waste of time. Identifying – and avoiding – wastes of time serves to magnify our own activities, which become more important by comparison.

This is how we seek to justify the lives we live. It is a lie.

Stop demanding that every part of your life have meaning. One of the reasons God gave us the Sabbath is to remind us that Creation does not depend upon us. We should learn to live an entire day without creating, without working, without doing. It reminds us that our value resides in our mere existence, not in what we fill it with. Experiencing a day like that might mean doing a few things that would look like a waste of time to someone else. Good. Do things you enjoy and don’t worry about whether you “gain” anything tangible from them. On your next Sabbath, block out some quality time, and waste it.