“We live in the time of silence, between the flash of lightning and the sound of thunder.” My cousin Fr. John gave his sermon today regarding the Gospel passage in Mark 13:1-8 when Jesus’ disciples asked Him what the end time will look like. He told them there will be hard things happening, that there will be the “birth pangs.”
What I heard first was a reprimand for living too slowly, for being lazy, for taking too much time and wasting too much time.
Then I heard something else: a reprimand for being too busy, for allowing the demands and activities and desires to “do” overtake everything else so that existence is exhaustion.
And then, I listened deeper and realized that, for me, it’s a “neither/both.”
It isn’t a place of laziness, but it is. It isn’t a place of crazy busy, but it is.
At the core, it’s a matter of what exactly is being done with the time that is given? I thought of Plato’s “the true, the good, and the beautiful” and applied that to my actions of my days. If what I’m doing isn’t true to God’s call or good towards my neighbor or bringing beauty to the Kingdom of God, that forces me to evaluate what I’m doing with God’s gift of my life. The message this morning wasn’t a shame on you for being still; it wasn’t a shame on you for being too busy. Instead, it was a “let’s pause and look.”
Thanks John+
revjaniekoch.org 