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Let's Waste Time...

Kia Ora friends, I think I was optimistic when I set out to do a blog post every week. My brain has been SO filled to the brim learning about everything from the importance of how the gospel arrived in Aotearoa, to the reformation, to salvation and what that really is!! Super exciting stuff but tough to dilute into a nice wee blog post for you all, but here I go!

One stream of the first module is on Spiritual Disciplines, I touched on this in my last post and I thought I would unpack some of the thinking and learning we have been doing around this because it’s super challenging.

We have been talking about this notion of The ‘Busy’ Christian. What do we fill our lives with? A lot of us are people who are just go, go, go. How much stuff do we do that distracts us, keeps us busy and stops us from looking at ourselves and, more importantly, at God?

There’s the obvious day to day things and commitments that we jam into our weekly schedule, but we looked at some deeper stuff. We went through a list of 6 things that become like our hearts desires, or become the motivation behind what we do:

1.     The need to prove ourselves… “I am justified by works”
2.     The need to meet people’s expectations… “What people think about me matters more than what God thinks about me”
3.     The need to control everything in life… “I can be in control, I have a plan”
4.     The pleasure of being under pressure… “I work better under pressure”
5.     The chasing of money… “Material possessions can satisfy”
6.     The desire to live a full, exciting life… “I can and should do everything”

I think there are elements to all of these things that are really good. But, how much they consume us is what we were focussing on. By taking any of these 6 things on and letting them consume our lives we are missing out on things that God offers in place of these. As we went through this content we were encouraged to reflect on what things resonate the most with us.

I think the control one has been the biggest for me. Moving my life up to Auckland to do this course has been a step towards me letting go of that control and just trusting in God!

God is wanting us to stop and look at him. To put down the distractions and create some space in which God can act. I think we are scared of an inner chaos that might open up when we get rid of all the distractions, who are you when you’re not busy doing things? That is the exact place God wants to move in. God is calling us out of loneliness, but into solitude.
Loneliness = inner emptiness
Solitude = inner fulfilment, totally at peace with being still and doing nothing, a state of mind and heart.


I have loved learning and reflecting about all of this stuff. Just to finish with one thought given to us that I absolutely loved! You know you’re good friends with someone when you spend a whole day together, you get to the end of the day and you realise you haven’t really done that much. You have just kind of sat around and chatted, maybe had plans, but never got around to them. You just wasted time together and weren’t bothered by it because it wasn’t actually a waste. How about wasting some time with God?

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