Routines

I have many routines that turn me toward God. Some are daily such as arising early to read and pray; reflecting on the daily mass readings over my lunch half-hour; prayer at bedtime. Others are weekly – Adoration and morning mass during the week.

When I travel I am thrown out of my routines, and it used to trouble me that I could so easily be distracted from prayer and time with God.  But I’ve learned that those times, too, can be used by God to refresh and bring new life into our relationship.

How beautiful is His creation and what a blessing to be able to see some of it anew when traveling, from mountains to oceans to countryside; plants and animals and starry skies.

And when surrounded by the people I most treasure in the world, isn’t their presence and their love an expression of God’s own presence and love?

I miss my routines and set times spent spiritually with Him and am glad to return to them. And I also treasure the times when His presence is tangibly expressed through others.

I am so very blessed.

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Stages

My mom used to say she wished teenagers could understand that high school isn’t the whole world. She wished that they really grasped that whatever happened in those brief years isn’t their entire life.

I wish more people understood that this life, too, is only a stage … a stepping stone into the next life.

We all begin in our mother’s womb; nine months of specific types of growth and formation. Just so is the time we spend on this earth. However long we have, it is just a stepping stone – time spent growing and being formed.

Most of us see this life as our “one shot.” But how differently would we chose to live it, if we really considered the next life … eternal life? Would people ever fall into deep despair and commit suicide if they saw this life as temporary and had hope for what is yet to come? Would we focus so intently on money and power and careers and the “things” of this world? Would we hoard our goods and our time for ourselves … or would we be more generous, sharing and helping each other move from this life to the next?

There is such a bigger picture for us to see if only we pause and ponder it. There is something greater here – something worth struggling toward. I recently heard a reflection that noted God’s presence and love is much like the sunshine that completely encompasses a house. But we, inside the house, must freely choose to open the windows and let the sunshine stream in … or shutter them tightly, pretending that the sunshine does not exist.

Seek what is above, where Christ is seated
at the right hand of God. Think of what is above,
not of what is on earth.

Oh, how I wish my dearest loved ones would throw open the windows and seek. That is what, truly, is most important.

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