What's Your Ratio?

Last weekend was the first time in about a year that I was home alone. I obviously live with my wife, but we also live with three other roommates in our 1,100 sq. ft house. My wife and brother in law went to S.C. for their grandma's 80th bday and Tim and Karen went to Orlando to celebrate her Dad's birthday which left me with the house to myself for an unprecedented 4 days.

I really tried to take advantage of this time and have somewhat of a solitude retreat where I spent most of my time at home alone with the Lord. No TV, no movies, no mindless internet surfing... I shut off every other input. I did leave to go to prayer on Friday and church Sunday, but other than that, not much activity. The result: a life changing weekend of hearing God's voice and being transformed in His presence. Best Memorial day weekend of my life.

During this time, it really hit me how little we listen to the Lord and really let His presence change us. It is not because we don't want to hear His voice. It isn't even because there are other things that we think are more important. The critical culprit is not a lack of desire, but the many other voices we are absently listening to and letting fill us up. We give the voice of facebook sometimes hours a day. We give talking heads or characters on our favorite TV shows hours a week. We read blogs (oh the irony) and surf twitter in our spare minutes during the day... and that adds up!

So put it all together - even if we spend an hour with the Lord a day, we are still spending an average of 2-3 hours listening to these other voices. That proportion worries me if outside inputs are doubling the time we spend getting input from and spending time with the Lord.

If we want to be disciples that make disciples, we need to prioritize the Lord over everything else, which means cutting out excess inputs. Now this isn't a call to cut yourself off from any and every media input and to say the devil running facebook or something ridiculous like that, but a call to constantly ask yourself a simple question: what is my ratio of time listening to the Lord and time listening to "outside voices"? If we really want to hear His voice, we have to make sure He is getting the majority of our attention.

Matt