Saturday, October 3, 2009

Fasting and Slavery

Lately I have been thinking a lot about slavery. Paul says we are either slaves to sin or slaves to God. Even when we are saved we can choose to go back to our old slavery to sin.

Anyway, I have been wondering, what am I a slave to? Enslaving myself to something is akin to making it an idol, to worshipping it. Sometimes we give ourselves over to something that is not worthy of our worship. Let's take it one step simpler still, and some things we do simply waste time.

Now that I think about it, I think perhaps in getting ready for testing I became a slave to it. I know I have definately teetered on that line of karate being an idol in my life. That is a constant danger for me. In that sense my foot injury was a good thing, it forced me to step back from karate. There are lots of random thoughts about my foot injury rolling around in my head; that is not the direction I intended for this blog post to take!

Where I was going in this post was in fasting! Not fasting from food, but fasting from whatever we do or use as an escape and time waster in this life. My pastor has talked about not reading novels because years ago they became something that consumed him. Perhaps God forced me to fast from karate for 2 months for the same reason. But again I digress from the small topic I started thinking about into a huge idol topic...

My own particular small thing that started me on this post will sound absurd... but thursday night I decided I was wasting way too much time playing spider solitare on the computer. Time just dissappears when I click on that game. And there is so much I would rather do! I would rather read a book, watch a movie, knit. And I should clean house.. Am I a slave to solitare? I don't know, but I decided I would not play a game for at least 1 week. We'll see. So far I haven't been home long enough to notice... but today I have computer work to do, and between those things to do a game would be... a waste of time!

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