We are all familiar with odometers in our vehicles. Odometers show the distance the car has traveled. By this we can often discern how much life the vehicle has left in it.
Some vehicles—usually trucks and heavy equipment—also have hour-meter indicators, which show how many hours the engine has been running. A vehicle like a snow plow might not have a lot miles to show, but the engine has been working hard at slow speeds plowing heavy snow in parking lots and driveways. If you were looking to buy this vehicle, the low miles on the odometer would make you think it has a lot of life left. But the hour meter would tell you otherwise.
And then there are vehicles that not only show engine hours, they also show how many of those engine hours were spent with the engine idling. You might be surprised to learn that idling is actually quite hard on an engine. I’ve seen trucks with very few miles on them, but an exorbitant amount of hours with the engine idling. Police cars often have very high engine idling hours, because the engine is idling while the officer waits for the speeders to come by, or the engine is left idling while he writes the accident report, or while the emergency lights are on as he directs traffic. If you find a police car for sale with 100,000 miles on it, just know that that car probably has the equivalent of 200,000 or more miles on it due to all the time it has spent idling. And know this, too. When that police car is clocking miles, they are not gentle miles. (No wonder I don’t recommend buying used police cars!)
The picture above is of the instrument panel of my truck. It shows it has 340,194 miles and 8,188 engine hours. It also shows 1,784 of those engine hours have been spent idling. Try as I might to avoid those damaging idling hours, they do accumulate.
Idleness causes harm to people, too! I suppose that’s why we have that saying, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” But the Lord urges us not to be idle as well (Prov 19:15; 31:27; Eccl 11:6; 1 Tim 5:13).
We might think we’re rarely idle, but is scrolling and scrolling on social media a form of idleness? Binge-watching movies or shows? Talking on the phone or messaging for hours? We would probably do well to consider what our engine-idle meter shows.