Note: On Tuesdays and some Sundays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.
A dear friend likes to tell a story about a chart, designed to open up dialogue with others or private recollections about pivotal points in 
your life. It breaks the journey into seven-year segments and aligns them with months of the year. A member of her family was shocked to find while he was in April, she was in November. It didn’t bother her; it worried him.
Another friend once commented that she wouldn’t be around when some of the grandkids graduated from college. I immediately contradicted her; it would only be twenty-one years, of course she’d still be around. Then I realized that would put her in her mid-nineties, and the odds were she’d be right.
It feels like we all and our loved ones have oceans of time on the planet until those little moments bring us up short, oceans of time to get our act together, to start loving instead of hating, to accept instead of judge, to help rather than criticize. But we don’t have oceans of time, not when we are toddlers, not when we are teenagers, not when we are in our thirties and not when we are in our sixties and beyond. We have this moment to prepare for the Lord’s arrival as Jesus reminds us in today’s Gospel reading from Luke 12:
“Gird your loins and light your lamps and be like servants who await their master’s return from a wedding, ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks.”
There’s no need to wring our hands about the way we wasted yesterday, nor do our grandiose plans for how we’ll serve Him “some day” matter much. What we have is today. May we make the most of it in the way we serve and love so that we may be ready no matter when He knocks.
