Spending time

With the fair over, school starting, and next weekend being Labor Day, we see it now as the end of the summer. So how did it go? Was it busy? Did we get everything done that we wanted to? I know that I did not.

I still have a few summer things that I want to get done, but have not gotten to them yet. We sometimes begin something and we have the best of intentions to get them done, but then the other things come up and our plans get derailed.

Sometimes, the things that interrupt our plans are much more important, like the time that we get to spend with a friend who needs something, sometimes work schedule changes, or we have a sick family member, but other times we just end up wasting time watching crazy cat videos on the internet. While there is an entertainment value of watching stupid pet videos, they can sometimes distract us from doing what we really need to be doing. One of my downfalls is “just one more episode on a streaming service”, or just one more part of a movie, but I know that there may be something more important that I need to do.

One of the things that we should always make time for is time with God. When we pray, we give God the greatest and most valuable thing that we have, and that is time. Time is something that we cannot buy, get back, or create more of, it is simply gone. Even though prayer is an investment of this great treasure, it is something that we should make sure that we do.

Even God prayed. In the Gospels, Jesus often goes away to pray with the Father, and we should use His example for us to follow.

There are so many ways that we can do some simple prayer time, we could spend 5 minutes after we wake up to ask God what we need to be doing in the day, this is something that I do each day. I will often spend a couple of minutes in prayer while the coffee is brewing as well. Our prayer times do not need to be full Holy Hours, while it is wonderful if we could do a Holy Hour every day, we know that it does not always work out that way. It can be broken up to different times in the day.

What if we decided to do a Holy Five? Pick a time, or even multiple times, of the day and spend Five minutes each with God, and then let that time grow in our hearts. It is just like that time that we spend with our friends and family, even a short amount of time is better than none. Find some more creative ways to spend that time in prayer with our Creator and Redeemer.

God bless,
Fr. Ken