The Blog

This Flashback blog was posted by staff member Casey Craigie on July 2, 2008, in the middle of his first season of our church's fireworks fundraiser...

So staying up all night alone and sleeping during the day while everyone else works gets pretty interesting, and by that I mean really boring. But on the plus side it gives you a lot of time to think about stuff without people shooting their mouths off and interrupting your flow of thought. During this thinking/boredom I looked at my watch to see what time it was and it happened to be 3:33. I went, "Oh, neat," in my mind and then did a mental double take and began to think about why I thought that.

You see there is nothing really special about 3:33 except it looks cooler than most other times of day, and I thought of other times that seem to stand out to people, that they tend to point out to others. First there are the times that show all the same digits, such as 3:33. Then there's the times where the digits appear to count up, 12:34, 1:23, and 4:56 are all examples of this. Finally there are the times when the digits appear to count down, 5:43, 3:21, and so on (2:10 doesn't stand out as much because it ends with a zero). There are thirteen of these eye catching times which occur a grand total twenty six times each day.

After I was done thinking through that I busted out the pen and paper (and phone) for some hard-core math! Did you know that 1% of a day is 14 minutes and 24 seconds, or that 1 second is 0.0166... minutes. How about that 1 minute it 0.0166... hours, but 1 second is 0.000277... hours. But of course you cannot forget that an hour is 0.05166... days.

Continuing with this line of thought about time, suppose that the average person lives to be eighty years old, and suppose that same person sleeps an average of eight hours a day their entire life. Remembering that there are 365.25 days in a year (gotta remember those leap years), this means that the average person sleeps for 26 and two-thirds years in their lifetime. That leaves 53 and one-third years of productive life.

Now suppose that same person gets a job; nine to five, half hour commute, two weeks paid vacation, that they have for forty years before retiring. That comes to fourteen and a half years of work meaning that they spend 41 years and two months either working or sleeping. We're now down to 38 years and ten months left for whatever the individual chooses and we haven't even accounted for school and eating and other such rather avoidable experiences!I guess what I'm trying to point out is that life is short, shorter than we often think, shorter than we act like it is.

Last I heard the average 20 year old male plays something like two hours of video games a day. If this is a continuing pattern then the average male will have wasted 5 years of his life, from twenty to eighty, on video games, not to mention the astronomically high number of hours the average person spends watching TV or movies! I'm not saying that any of these activities are bad, in fact I'm quite fond of all three. What I am trying to say is this life is too precious and too short to waste any of it. Don't be a chicken, do what you know you should and live life for all it can be.

More than just live life for all it can be, but live for all that Jesus has for you. Our time here is short, how are you stewarding the time God gave you?