“The bad things in life open your eyes to the good things you weren't paying attention to before.”

"The present moment is ours." — Saint Faustina

Gospel text (Mt 24,42-51):
Jesus said to his disciples:
"Stay awake!
For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.
Be sure of this: if the master of the house
had known the hour of night when the thief was coming,
he would have stayed awake
and not let his house be broken into.
So too, you also must be prepared,
for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.

"Who, then, is the faithful and prudent servant,
whom the master has put in charge of his household
to distribute to them their food at the proper time"
Blessed is that servant whom his master on his arrival finds doing so.
Amen, I say to you, he will put him in charge of all his property.
But if that wicked servant says to himself, 'My master is long delayed,'
and begins to beat his fellow servants,
and eat and drink with drunkards,
the servant's master will come on an unexpected day
and at an unknown hour and will punish him severely
and assign him a place with the hypocrites,
where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth."

How years go by! Months are reduced to weeks, weeks to days, days to hours, hours to seconds...» (St. Francis de Sales). Every day, every hour, every instant in our life, the Lord is close to us. Through internal inspirations, through the persons around us, through the events that are happening and, as the Apocalypse says: «Behold, I am standing at the door, and I am knocking: if any one hears my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me» (Rev 3:20).

Do the job at hand, don’t look too far down the road, don’t get too distracted by extraneous thoughts or temptations. When you are hoeing a field, or picking fruit, or re-building an engine, or painting a house, you know what the end should be, but if you don’t concentrate on the details, the steps to get there, you will not end up where you thought you would.

So too with the end days, whether it be of our personal lives or the world itself. Those events will happen. We know that as a fact. But if we lose sight of the details, the journey, the how we pick the fruit today, or apply the paint, we won’t end up where we planned, but somewhere else.