God’s ways are not our ways.
God’s thoughts are not our thoughts.
And in today’s Gospel we learn God’s math is not our math. Our calculations on what can be done are not always going to serve us well when it comes to calculating what God can do.
Men are common sense creatures. We survey the problem and look at the options our mind can be assured are reasonable and we make decisions. But when it comes to our spiritual lives and the journey we are called to follow, that is not always going to serve us at all.
We hear the call to relationship with God and look at our time and schedule and can’t conceive of a day with prayer winding throughout. There are not enough minutes in the day. When I heard from the new deacons going through formation and they told me the requirements for prayer and adoration and meditation I was amazed that these fathers and husbands who worked all day and cared for their families would ever have time. The math didn’t make sense. But these men changed their lives to fit the requirements of the calling as they refocused on what was important and what should just be let go of.
Many will look at the teachings of Christ and will see them as rules or confining structure that limits what our options are and what we can do. They will look at all the things they want to do and start counting off why it is impossible for them. “Saturday, I have the big game at the bar that I must be at, it’s my team!” Or “the children have sleepovers and parties and celebrations so Sunday Mass would be difficult.”
This counting of time is where we get it all wrong because we still see God as an add on service to this experience called living. Instead of the primary reason we are here in the first place. We see God as a tightly packaged event that is excluded from the rest of our life and only allowed 1 hour a week.
And the solution of course is that our life is not our own. Never was. It belongs to Jesus Christ who created all of us and everything.
And our objective in life is not to live like nonbelievers do but to live as children of God. Created to first and foremost strengthen our relationship with God so that he truly is the most important thing in our life. And the more we draw him into our living the more everything else fits and makes sense.
It was never about not having enough time but about having our priorities in order.
It’s the difference between living and being who we were created to be or settling for a broken life where there is never enough time, we always need more things, and we follow the world and errant feelings and voices to lead us down the path to destruction.
There IS only so much time. And there are only two choices in life. We either choose God and say yes to the path we were born for. Take up our true nature as children do God ….or we decide to follow the world and the evil one.
We know the outcome. Shouldn’t we begin today and ask what is in my way of being the disciple I was created to be?
Deacon Tony Pynes 
Leave a comment