Wasting time is costly because it rarely feels dangerous while it is happening.
It usually comes quietly. A few minutes here. A distraction there. One more glance at a notification. One more hour given to something that does not matter much. It rarely feels like you are throwing life away. It feels small. Harmless. Easy to justify.
Perhaps, you tell yourself you are paying attention because you care. That this is time well spent. That while others sleep, you are staying watchful.
It feels like vigilance and preparedness. It feels like keeping informed for the sake of your family, exposing what others refuse to see, gathering knowledge that will one day prove necessary.
So you tell yourself.
When you are young, this is especially easy because time feels endless. You spend it freely because you assume there will always be more. More time to get serious. More time to become disciplined. More time to repair what was neglected. More time to become the husband, father, worker, or man you know you ought to be.
But time does not wait for us to get serious.
It keeps moving.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
And as the years pass, life has a way of waking you up to what was lost.
The child you were too distracted to notice becomes the grown son who no longer thinks to call when he is in town.
The wife whose attempts at connection were often pushed aside stops trying as much.
The discipline you meant to develop tomorrow hardens over years of weak habits.
The opportunities to build, teach, shape, save, and prepare slowly pass by.
And one of the hardest lessons a man learns is that some things cannot simply be made up later.
You can repent. You can change. You can be forgiven. But forgiveness does not always remove the earthly consequences of wasted years.
This is what makes wasting time such a costly illness. It steals slowly. Quietly. Almost invisibly. Often you do not realize what it has taken until you look up and see what could have been.
What a tragedy to become deeply informed about things far away while neglecting the people sitting across from you in your own living room.
What a tragedy to model for your children a life ruled by distant distractions instead of faithful attention to what is nearest.
The most important work most men will ever do is not flashy.
It is the ordinary work of daily faithfulness. Listening well. Praying consistently. Teaching patiently. Working hard. Paying attention. Being fully present where God has placed you.
That kind of life is built slowly.
And so is its opposite.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Do not waste your time.
Spend it on what will still matter when the noise fades, and all that remains is what you built in the lives of those God gave you to love.
@3x4r3x@JeremyDBoreing@Lauren_Southern John Lovell (Warrior Poets Society), Gates Garcia (We The People), Pavel (Be a Man With Me)
https://t.co/io5vunbAam
@autumn_inkblood@mermaidwrites Grammarly actually has that, I think it even allows you to playback the writing of it, and it also will track what you copy and paste into the document, and often where you pasted it from.
@KevinEspiritu@LinusEkenstam Why do all these people not understand that we can tell it's a bunch of 3 second clips stitched together. It's jarring to see so many cuts, let alone all the other issues.
@smartereveryday@MattWhitmanTMBH a fun American example of a Shibboleth is all of the towns in Ohio that are named after foreign cities but pronounced differently. Eg Versailles = ver-sails not var-si, Lima = Lye-ma not Leee-ma
This was used in prohibition to detect the feds at the speakeasy.
@chadrsmith704@LucasnMe123@cudchewerchad@AshFarms I think many of the pharisees would have been trained in Greek since they were generally wealthy and highly educated - but I could be off base there.
@AshFarms I posted my attempt of an answer to the first question to someone in this post below:
https://t.co/Q1ZD9oRdvw
To the second question, only Mormons believe that Jesus came to America and they also have many other false beliefs about Jesus that put them outside of Christianity.
@LucasnMe123@cudchewerchad@AshFarms The Bible was written in 3 languages. Primarily Hebrew (old testament) and Greek (new testament). Because of this translation is needed. All of these are different approaches at translation, word for word translations just translate the words with minimal rephrasing 1/
@LucasnMe123@cudchewerchad@AshFarms You're so welcome. I tagged him before, but @WesleyLHuff's website and YouTube channel are full of fantastic information to help learn about how we got the Bible and even dive into nerdy details about it. Feel free to ask other questions, I'm just a layman but I love God's Word.
@LucasnMe123@cudchewerchad@AshFarms@WesleyLHuff Translators use a science called textual criticism to identify and correct for transcription errors etc over the millenia. So if I wrote two words twice or made a typo while copying, the error in the text can be traced in a family tree. It's really an interesting world! 4/4
@LucasnMe123@cudchewerchad@AshFarms@WesleyLHuff Paraphrases are when someone interprets what they think the author meant and puts that in (my least favorite). The different translations aren't so massively different as to cause worry - many variations are more about style or taste. 3/