Where does the time go?

As you look about your home, your yard, your neighborhood, or wherever you might be, do you ever say to yourself, “I can’t be as old as I am?”  Luckily, some of us don’t feel as old as we actually are and we have been blessed without having to endure any major illnesses.

When I applied for Medicare, the woman on the phone said, “I need to write down any and all medications that you take so that I can advise you properly.” When I didn’t respond, she repeated her request.  This time I said, “I don’t take anything.”  Her reply was, “You’re weird!”

Well, we know that!  You have to be somewhat weird to live in today’s society.  But, that’s been said about many of the past decades and what has gone on just in our country.

It does seem strange that as of this September: I started college 55 years ago, I entered the United States Navy 50 years ago, and I began working at St. Andrew’s after retiring from teaching 18 years ago.  Where does the time go?

In the reading this week from the Song of Solomon, the beloved comes leaping and bounding like a gazelle or a young stag.  That’s not happening!  From James we read that it would profit us all to “…be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger...” and to “…be doers of the word, not merely hearers…”

As we begin the discernment process for our parish later this month, as our diocese gets down to the work of choosing a new bishop, and as with the passage of years most of us come to reflect more on the wisdom of others, let us also reflect on the words attributed to St. Francis:

Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.  Amen.

Bill Wilds