Monday, November 12, 2018

Tea Time

Written by 

I’ve recently started trying to schedule Tea Time into my week, just spending time with my wife and kids, drinking tea and maybe eating a little snack.

The challenge is, it seems like such an utter waste of time. But on the other hand, the exact reason I want to do it is because it is such a waste of time.

Our lives are busy. I work. Jane homeschools. The kids… do kid stuff. We have hobbies, Mass, volunteer activities, sports, etc. And Netflix certainly isn’t going to watch itself! Somewhere in there we’re probably supposed to sleep. There just aren’t enough hours in the week to get it all done. My to-do list, despite my best efforts, keeps growing. And the sidewalk still isn’t shoveled.

In the midst of this, I’m choosing to do something that is pretty much useless, a waste of time. I could knock a couple more things off my list. We could cover another subject in school. We could attempt to clean and organize our house. Stuff could finally get done! But instead we’re sitting down together and drinking hot flavor water.

Bishop Robert Barron says that the most useless activities are also the most important, and that play is useless in this sense because it’s purely for its own sake. He’s talking especially about the Mass. I’m talking about Tea Time – maybe not quite in the same league, but important in my life. And I’m a coffee drinker (because it’s delicious), so setting time aside for tea (nasty, stupid tea) seems especially useless.

Tea Time is good for me, for us. It’s useless, which makes it important. It’s not a means to a better end, but it just is. I waste/spend time with my family, not so that I can get something out of them, but because it’s simply good to spend time with my family.

So, are you taking time to be useless? It might be the most important thing you could be doing.

Read 3065 times Last modified on Wednesday, November 14, 2018