“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…………….
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