Do You Really Want to Live in the Future You’re Building?

June 26th, 2008

2 Kgs 24:8-17 / Mt 7:21-29
Most of us were very young when we first heard the old adage, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” And very probably most of us paid no attention to its wisdom at the time, because as children we’d been guests at an extended free lunch for as long as we could remember. With the optimism of youth, most of us continued to reach for that free lunch in multiple contexts, and we discovered to our woe that eventually the bill came: There was an exam, or a job performance review, or a project update, and we were empty handed.
Those early mistakes ought to have been lessons for a lifetime, but too often they were not. In too many parts of our lives, we’re still living as if no bill will ever come, as if we could immunize ourselves from the adverse consequences of our inattention or our poor choices. This denial of reality is painfully visible in so many marriages and in so much of parenting. It’s visible too in so many people’s haphazard spiritual lives.
But as we saw in today’s Old Testament reading, eventually time is up, we are faced with the consequences of our choices, and too often we lose the good things that should have been ours for the taking. God is eternally forgiving, but nature inexorably takes its course, and effect follows cause.
Make very sure that you are really prepared to live in the future that you are building with your choices today! If it’s time for a change, God will help you if you let him. And woe to the one who looks the other way!

by Monsignor Dennis Clark, Ph.D.