Last week when I went to UMass Memorial Hospital to visit a parishioner, I noticed a poster while waiting for the elevator. It said, There are 1440 minutes in a day…schedule 30 of them for physical activity. While not about to climb six flights of stairs, I decided the least I could do would be to walk down them!
There I discovered more posters and slogans encouraging people to do something we all know is so important and necessary in order to remain in good health – exercise! Even though 1440 minutes sounds like plenty of time, how difficult it is for us actually to find 30 of them that we can dedicate to physical activity and exercise.
When it comes to our spiritual lives, we find the same number of minutes in a day and the very same challenge of devoting some of them to prayer, worship and living out our faith. Because our lives often have us running in a hundred different directions, we can easily lose our bearings and find our priorities disordered.
Relationships and commitments that we know are most important in our lives can easily be neglected and ignored. Finding time to pray each day or an hour to attend Mass on Sunday can become real challenges for many people who really do want to live out their faith. One helpful and practical way of dealing with this struggle is to understand better and embrace more fully the basic principles of Christian stewardship.
For many people the word stewardship means nothing more than money, but it actually has a much deeper meaning than that. Stewardship is about putting God first in our lives and giving back to God our “first fruits” and not just the leftovers. Stewardship helps us to see that God is the source of everything – all life,all of time and all our talents.
When we realize this and receive God’s gifts gratefully, we seek to respond by sharing these very gifts with others. With gratitude to God for all that we have received, we take a portion of our time each day and each week and give it back to God in prayer and worship. Likewise with our talents and our treasure, we share a portion of them with joy as an act of thanksgiving. Stewardship leads us to a life of Christian discipleship and helps us to keep our priorities in the proper order.
I pray that these days of Thanksgiving and the coming season of Advent may give all of us at St. Mary’s the opportunity to renew and deepen our desire to take time each day and every week to offer prayer and praise to our God.
God bless you all.
Fr. Michael F. Rose
Joyce O’Connor Davidson and Fr. Mike share a laugh at a recent
Commission for Women event held at St. Mary’s Parish Hall.
That’s mother Ann O’Connor’s head in the lower right corner.
