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Dear Friends, The Summer days fly by! The days of life fly by! Theresa and I are jetting off to Minneapolis, the land of my youth, 10,000 lakes, and 10,000,000 mosquitos, for a surprise 40th birthday party for my oldest brother. It’s a little wierd because I remember my father’s surprise 40th birthday party. It doesn’t seem that long ago. Do I look as old to my nieces and nephews as all of my parent’s friends looked to me? And the answer echoes back to me mysterieously through the universe, "No. You look even older than that!" I’m always amazed at how quickly each week passes. When the alarm goes off early on Sunday morning, it feels like I was just doing this a very short while ago. My Summer now is so different from the days of my youth, when the days seemed so long (sometimes too long), and the months of summer vacation seemed like an eternity. Sometimes, I’m not sure if Einstein got it right. I’m not sure if time is relative to space as much as it is to age. We saw a big difference last week between our aged Holy Father John Paul II and the hundreds of thousands of teens and young adults gathered in Toronto for World Youth Day. How differently the days must pass for each of them, and yet they gathered to worship the one ageless, ancient God. This is the same God who saw the dawn of humanity, the pyramids being built in ancient Egypt, the building and destruction of three Jewish temples, the life and crucifixion of the Servant and Son, Jesus of Nazareth, the proclamation of his Gospel to all the corners of the world, the birth of every baby, and the death of every human person. Truly, as they must have sung in Toronto, "our God is an awesome God!" The Gospels tell us that there is no time better than the present moment. Look at the workers who arrive late to the field, or the repentant criminal hanging next to Jesus, or Lazarus, already dead for four days, or Simeon and Anna, who spent their lives at the Temple awaiting the Messiah, or the man who made great plans for tomorrow by hoarding his grain, only to lose it all. To God, what we’ve done in our past or what we plan to do with our future aren’t nearly as important as what we do with ourselves and how we treat each other now. Everything seems to fly by . . . our days, our years, the Canadian geese overhead, and the cars on 280. That’s life! And life to the full is when we decide to move along with God as our ready companion. Pat Vallez-Kelly |
