Wednesday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time
At work recently, I was struggling to get everything done that I needed to do. While my workload kept growing, as many of ours have, my ability to juggle the amount of tasks has diminished because I haven’t seen things clearly. Ministry can be an unpredictable vocation. Yet what kept to coming to me in prayer was the message to be prepared. As an Eagle Scout I understand well that the motto of the Boy Scouts is to “Be Prepared”, yet my inability to handle unexpected realities suggested otherwise.
Being prepared means understanding the mystery that is our “eternal purpose” which means that all we do is done with through the gift of God’s grace. For Paul, this meant being humble in his understanding of self, and bold in his understanding that all he accomplished was through faith in Jesus. Fr. Robert Barron, a priest from the Archdiocese of Chicago, puts it a different way. “Our lives are not about us.” Even my first sentence suggests, that it is I who accomplish things.
Who is it that accomplishes anything? Is it us or the one who sent us? Perhaps we could ponder our own motivations in order to answer these questions. Paul uses the phrase “copartners” in describing the Body of Christ: “Copartners in the promise in Christ Jesus” through the preaching of the Gospel. This language reinforces a less dichotomous approach. It seems both holy and whole that what is accomplished (by us) is done so by God through us. Both God and ourselves need to be weighted equally. What seems precarious is how we arrive at this balance.
It is a balance that will allow us to be prepared no matter when the master approaches with a need or task. The tension for many of us is that we forget to put the Lord first. How do we bring balance to being a faithful disciple? The answer may be as numerous all the drops of water in the world. Today’s psalm leads us to perhaps one of the better answers: give thanks to the Lord and sing praise to the Lord. For many of us, including me, having a pronounced ‘attitude of gratitude’ would move us greatly in our efforts toward being prepared for the unexpected. This is especially true since none of us know the day or the hour in which the master will call upon us to join him in eternity. Amen!
-Michael Montgomery