A rather nice metaphor for the need to spend time with God came to me on Sunday. If you have a load of money and you want it to grow, do you put it in a pot and forget about it, or do you invest it (wisely), share it with people and do things with it? Chances are that putting it in a pot and forgetting about it will make it shrink, inflation will make goods and services more expensive and it you’re unlucky other people will come along and take bits of it or even the whole lot. If you want your money to grow you have to invest it and do things with it.
This itself, is not unobvious (which totally is a word) but I was reminded of it again during the week whilst surfing the internet. In computing, it’s very easy to get stuff for free – Operating Systems, compilers, games, office suites, accounting software for example – much of which is quite complex and takes someone else’s time to produce. I was downloading the FoxPro OLEDB Provider (don’t laugh) and Sybase’s SQL Anywhere SDK for my project of the moment. I was expecting to have to pay for Sybase’s SDK, but was pleasantly surprised to find it was free, because much of Sybase’s produce strikes me as the kind of overpriced rubbish that infests commercial software development.
Anyway, often in computing you can just go in, download something, read a few examples and be up and running in a day or two. With God it’s not quite the same. The Bible has no quick tutorials to let you hack together something quickly, it’s difficult and challenging from end to end. With a new appreciation of the troubles that hacked-together-in-two-days-with-a-tutorial code looks like and the problems it causes, I hope that this will encourage me to read the Bible and spend time with God on a more regular basis than what might occur at the moment…
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