I suggest you make his acquaintance.
Here’s my newest favorite: Living the Present Moment, which turned out to be more powerful than I expected.
You see, I am trying to stop wasting time on the internet. You know how we can be – checking email 6x a day, the headlines just more time or FB, twitter or whatever draws us away from what we are supposed to be doing. Don’t worry, I fully recognize the irony of writing this on the internet I am currently writing about avoiding but I know you understand my point. This is not the genuine seeking of information but the risky prowling about to see what’s new.
What I am talking about is the mindless rabbit hole of the internet which I do while I am doing something else – folding laundry, waiting for a child to be done with current homeschool ‘thing’, cooking dinner, even watching TV or a movie so it seems less a waste.
But, in truth, I do this, double duty as it were, only to lessen my guilt. After all, I know the risks. I know my cruising the internet is putting my eyes and soul at risk of reading offensive stories, seeing sin or reading an opinion which is not based on truth. And, before you know it, I’ve not wasted just the 15 minutes of folding one basket of clothes but an hour of seeing or hearing unnecessary stuff.
Now, I am trying to stop but I know (from past attempts) that my cold-turkey efforts have been miserable failures, so, I made a deal with myself (you know you can do that, don’t you? give yourself a better thing as you are trying to stop a different often more harmful thing).
Anyways, what I told myself is that if I am tempted to get on my computer when I know I shouldn’t, I can only look at ‘good stuff’ or listen to ‘good music’.
This bribery has led me to check out the headlines at the National Catholic Register over NBC News. My music is dictated by the Christian worship channel on Pandora or the great music list my son created for me at Spotify and Youtube is restricted to good channels such as learning a new crochet stitch, watching Chef John from allrecipes.com show off a new recipe or, even better, channels such as Bishop Barron or Ascension Presents’ Fr. Mike Schmitz.
As a result, when I was folding two baskets of laundry this morning, I watched the video linked up above which not only lead to me realizing how often I wish I was in a different season and how much I love Fr. deCaussade’s book (time to re-read it) but, most importantly, deciding to let God take more of your time does brings you rich rewards such as discovering this video which I really needed to hear this morning.
So, the next time you are looking to waste some time, consider checking it out.
