“Go to your checkbook and see what you spend money on. In an instant, you will know what is important to you because your money goes toward it.”

 “You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, non-apologetically, to say “no” to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger ‘yes’ burning inside. The enemy of the ‘best’ is often the ‘good’” - Author Unknown

Gospel Text: (MT 12:1-8)

Jesus was going through a field of grain on the sabbath.

His disciples were hungry

and began to pick the heads of grain and eat them.

When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him,

"See, your disciples are doing what is unlawful to do on the sabbath."

He said to the them, "Have you not read what David did

when he and his companions were hungry,

how he went into the house of God and ate the bread of offering,

which neither he nor his companions

but only the priests could lawfully eat?

Or have you not read in the law that on the sabbath

the priests serving in the temple violate the sabbath

and are innocent?

I say to you, something greater than the temple is here.

If you knew what this meant, I desire mercy, not sacrifice,

you would not have condemned these innocent men.

For the Son of Man is Lord of the sabbath."

One of the most important things in human life is to learn how to set and keep proper priorities.

Often the difference between a happy and unhappy life, between a rewarding and a wasted one, centers on whether we've set the right goals and perseveringly sought to achieve them.

And it is getting harder today for people to set and achieve these priorities. So many of our technological advances, while offering great possibilities to improve our lives, often just leave us torn apart by a list of to-dos that just seems to keep growing, enslaving us to so many tasks that there seems to be no time for the things that deep down we know are most important.

Scores of American men have long complained that, because of all of the demands at work and the fulfillment of other duties, they have less and less time to do the things that are really fulfilling. Even many teenagers and young kids today have to keep a detailed calendar because with lessons, sports, homework, and even play dates, their schedule has become overwhelming.

To make matters more complicated across the generations, technological advances like cell phones, email, texts, Facebook, and Twitter has created a culture of the nanosecond, where those contacting us have gotten so used to an immediate response that we feel we must drop what we're doing and answer right away.

Life has become like the whack-o-mole game that many of us used to play at arcades, where black moles pop up in front of us and we have to whack them down continuously with a mallet. The only difference is that what we're about is not a game and that the moles are coming up not just in front of us in five or six predictable holes but all around us all the time.

To all of us in this frenetic era, who feel drawn-and-quartered by seemingly having to do so many things well at once, Jesus, with words shocking to our 21st century sensibilities, presents us today the Good News. He who came to set the captives free, who is the Truth incarnate, who knows everything and who cannot lie, tells us in one sentence: "You are worried and distracted by many things. Only one thing is necessary."

The crucial question to be answered is, "What is that one thing?"

Think about it…………….