Reading Rainbow..opening books, opening minds

I started reading a book today. Usually over Christmas break I watch unprecedented amounts of television and sleep more than I have all semester. So I decided I'd read. And the only book my church library had by John Piper was God's Passion for His Glory, which ironically starts off with how important it is to read challenging books to grow our mind. This quote convicted me--

"The mind can atrophy, like the muscles, if it is not used....And this is a terrible penatly, for there is evidence that atrophy of the mind is a mortal disease. There seems to be no other explanation for the fact that so many busy people die so soon after retirement....Television, radio, and all the sources of amusement and information that surround us in our daily lives are...artificial props. They can give us the impression that our minds are active, because we are required to react to stimuli from outside. But the power of those external stimuli to keep us going is limited. They are lke drugs. We grow used to them, and we continuously need more and more of them. Eventually, they have little or no effect."

Piper spends the first chapter of this book justifying the reading of Jonathan Edwards' essay entitled "The end for which God created the world" which apparently is a lost phenomenon. I'm expecting it to be a difficult read, considering Piper devoted an entire chapter to convincing his readers of its importance, but I've made it my goal to read and understand both Piper and Edwards' (whose first names are both John..apparently it invokes spirituality..ha) thoughts on the subject.

Friends, go check out a book that was written at least fifty years go (how else will we understand the world outside the tiny sphere around our current lives) and read it over this Christmas break. If you have to have a dictionary at your side when reading it, all the better. There will be no tests, no quizes, no papers...just gained wisdom and knowledge. And who knows, you may be one step ahead of your classmates who can now successfuly quote every episode of Friends and never actually got out of bed.

I feel like the guy off of reading rainbow right now.