Stewarding our time

This evening at cell (the healthy church type, not the bombing type) we have continued our churches theme of Stewardship, focusing on the use of our time, talents, and treasure/tithe. Our welcome question tonight asked us to roughly calculate the proportion of our time we spend on various activities: Sleep, Work, Leisure, God-stuff (praying, reading Bible, worshiping), Chores, and other.

The findings were NOT surprising. Here's a summary of our conclusions:

1. We do not get enough sleep - none of us.
There are, of course, several schools of thought about the merits/demerits of having long lay-ins at the weekend, versus the regular settled habit of sleeping the same amount/getting up at the same time every day. While we agreed lay-ins are nice, there was the clear sense that we should be trying to be more habitual. Whatever our position on the pattern of sleep - we all accepted that we would operate much better on more sleep.

2. We seem to be habit-averse.
There is the odd belief in the group that Habit = Boring. While we happily accept the need to take regular exercise, have regular habitual sleep, we are less inclined to think this way spiritually.

3. We spend little time on our own

4. What do I have to show for my spare time?

5. We spend a small fraction of our time with God, or in God-stuff.
I wonder if we should seek to tithe our time? 10% of our day would be 144 minutes - 2 hours and 24 minutes - imagine our days looking like that?

6. Not enough exercise

7. We don't actually watch that much TV.

8. Our lives are far more full of leisure than we let ourselves recognise.
We moan lots about work, but in truth our group of friends spend lots of its time relaxing, often together.

9. Time with family?
Not many of us could refer confidently to time spent at the dinner table

10. We find it hard to remember how we spend our time!

Some thoughts following on from this:
- We enjoy time spent in God's presence, but we don't do it as we're frail and broken
- Do I, by my choices, send a message to people that they're not loved?
- To some extent there is a place for the vow of service/simplicity when thinking about stewardship. We would use our time and talents more effectively if we undertook to serve people each and every day. A vow of simplicity would best enable us to approach money in a Godly manner.

CHALLENGE:
1. How is my use of time?
What changes are needed? Am I aware of where my time goes?
2. How could we corporately better use our time to sacrificially serve others?
In the community: are their clubs, needs, projects we could undertake? In church: needs to be met (balanced against our talents)
3. How could we corporately serve God more?
Speaking to others about the Good News.