The Great Reversal

The rush and the stress that seems to come with finals time have finally settled on Greenvilles Campus. It's funny how all a teacher has to do is tell you that a test is worth 10% of your grade (and actually mean it, unlike high school, and all of the sudden, your education matters enough to study for it.
Do not worry. I'm not making fun of anyone. I'm actually in a way describing myself.

This however got me thinking about our scripture reading. And it also got me thinking about Facebook. And if someone who didn't know me was watching my every action, they would almost definitely say that Facebook is way more important to me then my spiritual life.

And that my friends, is a problem.

It's bad, because sometimes, when there's nothing to do here in 316 (which often times is the case, unless you want to sit around the virtual fire place) I'll go "Hey, I'll get on Facebook. Surely there will be someone to talk to on there!" And sure enough, there usually always is. While that's all well and good, sometimes, after I'm done talking to people, I'll catch myself STARING at the home page, looking at nothing. What in the world is wrong with me?

In Jesus' day, the children, by age 5, would be expected to have the Torah (the first five books of the bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) memorized. We say that we could never do that now. But is that really true?

We're going to do a little math here: I would say that on average, a teen spends about 3-4 hours on Facebook any given day. So, if you take that and multiply that by 365 (for days of the year) you get between 1095-1460 hours a year spent on Facebook. That's roughly 6 1/2 weeks a year spent on Facebook.

Wow.

Now, what if we were to switch the amount of time spent on Facebook and the amount of time reading the Bible? (which is - for the average person - is about 60 hours a year.) There are 31,173 verses in the Old Testament, and about...842 (really rough average) verses in the Torah. Statistics show that the average person reads about 275 words a minute. The average verse length (in the KJV) is 25 words. This means that the average person can read 11 verses a minute.

So, if one were to read their bible for a month and a half for 3-4 hours a day, they would be able to read The ENTIRE Bible about...10 times. You could read the Torah about...1,114 times.

Plenty of time to memorize it i'd say.

So how about we all do that for a month and a half? Switch the amount of time we're on Facebook and the amount of time we read the Bible.

Then we can start memorizing Gods word rather than memorizing our friends statuses.

ps - it's Bennetts Birthday today. :)