Being wasteful

When we keep certain things for ourselves, they spoil. We keep flesh too much for ourselves, and it turns into lust. We keep money too much for ourselves, and it turns into avarice. We keep learning too much for ourselves, and it turns into conceit. We keep time too much for ourselves, and we waste our lives. I wonder if at the end of our days the slow process of just wasting away is not due to the way we live during our life. Have we been sufficiently wasteful of the gifts that God has given to us, whatever they happen to be, particularly time? Just think of how much time you waste in the course of a day; over a daily newspaper, when the only things you can be absolutely sure are true are the sporting page and the stock market indexes. (If, for example, the Redskins beat the Rams, you don't say, 'This is a Republican paper, I'll go out and see what a Democratic paper has to say.') We waste time on useless reading and then say, 'I don't have time for an hour of prayer.' Actually, we do not have time for anything else. When this hour is wasted before the Lord, then it will be remembered like the water from the well of Bethlehem. There must be in our lives a kind of impulsiveness, a giving that doesn't measure. Perhaps we reckon our lives and our time and our energy just a little too mathematically.