Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time C
Many here will still remember Sr. Mary Hallahan, the spunky
Ursuline Sister who, over the years, served in many parishes across this region
before she died at the end of 2012.
Sr. Mary had a nickname for me: “the late Fr. Giroux.” It’s not that she heard a rumor of my early
demise, nor that she wished me dead.
(Heaven forbid!) It’s that
she noticed—especially when I’d arrive for daily Mass—that I was frequently
coming in at the very last minute, or very often arriving a little bit late.
Guilty as charged!
Now, some people are chronically late because they’re lazy:
they simply can’t get out of bed or out of the chair to go and do what needs to
be done. Others are late because
they’re selfish and rude: assuming that their time and schedule are more
important than those of the folks they continually keep waiting. For me, the problem is that I’m always
trying to do more than the time at hand will actually allow. We priests are busy—like everybody else
these days—so I try to make the most of whatever time I’ve got. But when I try to squeeze too much into
those last 15 minutes, I consistently end up behind schedule for the next
event.
Being “the late Fr. Giroux” helps me to relate to Elisha in
our first reading, and those would-be-disciples mentioned in the gospel I just
read. When they hear the call of
the Lord, they ask for more time.
“Can’t it wait just a minute?
Or another day? Or maybe
until next year? There’s so much
left to do!” It’d be easy enough
to think the message God’s giving in the scriptures this Sunday is one about good
time management—providing helpful hints for organizing your schedule based on
spiritual principles. But God has
so much more in mind!
You see, it’s not enough that God and the things of God
regularly make it onto your to-do list, nor that God is the most important item
on the list, nor even that he’s at the top of your list. What God wants is to write your to-do
list. God will never be satisfied
with being another part of your life; his place is at the heart of your life,
giving direction and purpose to everything else. That’s because what interests God is not so much what we can
do or how much we can accomplish, as it is who we are and whose we are—giving
ourselves to him 100%.
So don’t merely include Jesus as one more thing on your very
busy agenda. Instead, let Jesus set
your agenda. And begin doing so now. Given what’s stake, this is something
for which we most certainly don’t want to be even just a little bit late.
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