What Do You Do With Your Leisure Time?

Again, in Ryken's book, Worldly Saints, he says this profound statement:

"One of the best tests of whether a person is generously educated is what he or she does with leisure time" (p.170).

I read this and had to set the book down and ponder. What do I do with my spare time? Do I really have spare time? Though it may see oftentimes that I don't have spare time because I am so busy, I really do have a lot of spare time.

Everyone in the world has the same amount of time in a day - 24 hours. No one has one minute more, or one minute less - but only 24 hours; that's it. What do you do with it?

If you sleep 8 hours a night, that leaves you with 16 hours in a day.
If you eat for a total of two hours a day, that takes you to 14 hours in a day.
If you then exercise for one hour every morning, that takes you to 13 hours in a day.
If you read your Bible and pray for one hour a day that then leaves 12 hours in a day.

So what do you do with the rest?

What do you do in your spare time? Read the Bible? Pray? Read books? Sit and contemplate? Memorize? Play video games? Surf the web?

The puritans are on to an important lesson here: if you want to judge yourself and your education, it's not really a matter of finishing a certain number of credit hours and completing a certain number of core classes. It really boils down to this: what do you do in your spare time?