FISHING: “If people concentrated on the really important things in life, there’d be a shortage of fishing poles.” Doug Larson
SCRIPTURE: “Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.” Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.’” James 4:13-15
REFLECTION: In her book “The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully” a collection of essays, Joan Chittister reflects on various topics from the perspective of old age. In her essay entitled “Time”, Chittister writes, “Living in the moment is not the mark of youth. Instead, the young are always on the way to somewhere else. They have no patience for now—because they live their lives trying to get beyond the confines of now to the possibilities of soon. They want to be older, to be independent, to be important, to be wealthy, to be somebody. They are immersed in wanting.” In contrast, she says, the old are immersed in being.
I think Chittister would be quick to say that she does not intend her observations to be iron-clad ones. Certainly we know young friends who seem wise and centered and old friends who always seem to be rushing frantically about. As one more old than young I am too often guilty of this: at the grocery store I often don’t use a cart so I can dart unencumbered through the aisles, dodging politely the slow moving shoppers who are caught up in the leisurely gift of now. In the mountains, in my backyard gardens, in worship, in pastoral meetings, I am “immersed in being”. Not so in the grocery store.
Perhaps life is a journey into a state of mind where more and more of us is immersed in being instead of doing or wanting. This is a lesson many newly retired people tell me they are struggling to learn. It is a lesson the ill or those in hospital know all too well. It is a lesson that new babies endeavor to teach us. It is a lesson we encounter at the bedsides of the dying. To be immersed in being is to be more attuned to God.
Stewardship of time has to do with recognizing who it is who owns our days. Hint: it is not us. If the Holy One breathed us into being, then with a divine inhalation we can be recalled at will. If we concentrated on the really important things in life, there’d be a shortage—of pews as well as fishing poles.
PRAYER: God the world is a marvelous place of possibility and promise. You gift us with talents and freedom to make our own way. Keep us ever mindful that regardless our path, you are the destination and indeed you are also the way. Help us to turn from those pursuits that lead us away from you. Remind us that we are beloved just as we are; there is nothing we must strive to do or be in order to delight you. Simply by being we bring you joy. Help us to live contentedly. With gratitude we pray. Amen.
