Tip of the Week: Limit Two Things
Twice in the last four months I’ve gotten text messages from my carrier that I’m about to exceed my data limit. Twice I paid overage fees. The warning didn’t work. Maybe I should have listened to that Sprint commercial that told me “I have the right to be unlimited” and changed plans.
Our culture is obsessed with unlimited consumption, having and doing. Two areas many of us struggle with are productivity and entertainment. I know it’s an issue for me. And what suffers? Sleep and rest. We might get away with it for a short time, but it’s something our children can’t afford to indulge.
I like to be productive, to work and accomplish things. I like entertainment, movies in particular. Sometimes I’ll take in two in one night. For some of us, it’s easy for our lives to begin to orbit these activities. I believe this is particularly true for our children, especially teens.
Tish Warren, one of my new favorite authors, writes in Liturgy of the Ordinary:
But my willingness to sacrifice sleep also reveals less noble loves. I stay up later than I should, drowsy, collapsed on the couch, vaguely surfing the Internet, watching cute puppy videos. Or I stay up trying to squeeze more activity into the day, to pack it with as much productivity as possible. My disordered sleep reveals a disordered love, idols of entertainment or productivity.
My willingness to sacrifice much-needed rest and my prioritizing amusement or work over the basic needs of my body and the people around me (with whom I am far more likely to be short tempered after a night of little sleep) reveal that these good things – entertainment and work – have taken a place of ascendancy in my life. In the nitty-gritty of my daily life repentance for idolatry may look as pedestrian as shutting off my email an hour earlier and resisting that alluring click bank to go to bed.
Limit work and entertainment.
That’s the tip of the week!
Curt Bumcrot, MRE
