It’s the time of year that if you’re on Instagram, all of the stories have been taken over by people showing their Spotify “Year in Review”. For those who don’t know what it is, Spotify basically takes a ton of data from their millions of users and turns it into fun statistics at the end of the year for each user so that they can see how many minutes they listened to, what artists they listened to most, what kinds of genres, etc.
It allows people to look back and relive some of the songs they listened to the most, but maybe only in the first half of the year. To reconnect with songs that may have gotten them through a tough time.
There are probably some people who would dog on this. That people shouldn’t be focusing so much on music and why would you share this but not the gospel. Some of that may or may not be true, though in general, I don’t have a problem with it, and l think it’s super fun to be able to see what kind of music I listened to and for how long I listened to it.
All of this as a preface to say, I couldn’t help but wonder something as I looked at the dozens of people on my feed who were sharing their amount of minutes they listened to music. Some of these were up to 80,000 minutes of listening to music. I don’t know if you can do some simple math, but by my calculations, that’s over 50 days (as in full 24 hour days) of listening to music.
Obviously, some of this might be people just playing it in the background or as they go to sleep, etc. But that’s the equivalent of a part-time job. Over 3 ½ hours every day.
My thought: What if as Christians we treated the Bible the same way?
How many minutes did you spend reading your Bible this year? How many new books did you read that you never had before? What was your go-to passage that you read the most times? Who was your favorite author?
What if we were as excited about our reading and getting to know Jesus as we are our music? Music is a lovely thing and I love this idea of seeing what you’ve listened to, but unfortunately, I’m afraid if we did the same thing with our Bible time, we’d see far fewer minutes and nothing showing trends.
As you see and count your minutes in your Spotify account, I encourage you to think about the minutes you spent with Jesus and ask if the difference in the number is something you are okay with.
If you had to cut one out, would you cut Jesus or your music out?
If you just answered “Jesus”, why doesn’t your Spotify track record seem to reflect that that’s what you would pick?
Are we pursuing God or are we still enjoying pleasure clothed in “worship music”?