Wasting your life...?

I was reading the blog Challies.com and he gave some startling facts about how we easily waste our life:

"According to a new “Video Consumer Mapping” study by Ball State University, Americans aged 65 and older spend an average of 420 minutes per day in front of a television screen. 420 minutes per day. Let that sink in for just a moment. That is seven hours; seven full hours. Every day. On average. That means that half of the days it would be more than seven hours. Is that three hours in the morning, perhaps 8 until 11 and then four more in the evening, maybe 7 until 11 PM? How is it even possible? It is unbelievable. And it does not even include time spent watching DVDs or Tivo."

This is astounding and scary! We so easily fill our lives up with rubbish, wasting our lives consuming ourselves to serve ourselves and to make ourselves feel better. When was it ever about serving ourselves? I so don't want to be like this, I don't want to waste my life. I want to enjoy life by enjoying Jesus and having Him as my treasure. But it is so hard, its so easy to be distracted with everything the world throws at you.

My greatest fear is that I lose my passion for Jesus, that I find myself middle aged, stuck in a middle class life, with hobbies, a nice house, money, comfortable, with my circle of friends and my routine. Not to say that these things are bad, but if thats all I have and am no longer seeking Jesus, being excited by the Gospel, seeing Jesus work in my life and those around me, praying with faith and yearning, repenting and having a passion for the lost and the poor, no longer reaching those in need... then my life is not worth living. Infact if I lose all those things I am near enough dead. If I lose Jesus then I lose everything - what would be the point in living?
As piper says, we are on this planet to make much of Jesus Christ.

What a challenge! What are we making much of right now? Are we wasting our life? Do we have a Holy Ambition?...

Lastly, a quote from piper:

“When I heard J. Oswald Sanders at the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School chapel speaking at the age of eighty-nine say that he had written a book a year for Christ since he was seventy, everything in me said, ‘O God, don’t let me waste my final years! Don’t let me buy the American dream of retirement—month after month of leisure and play and hobbies and putzing around in the garage and rearranging the furniture and golfing and fishing and sitting and watching television. Lord, please have mercy on me. Spare me this curse.’”

Spare me from this curse also - now as a young woman and then as a middle aged woman and then as an old woman.