A 2nd Helping Today

19th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Gospel – Luke 12: 32-48

I Need A Backup

 

 

As you know, I’ve been writing these reflections on the Gospel of the day for quite a while now.  It began on March 15, 2020, when Covid shut everything down, businesses, meetings and parishes.  I thought, at the time, that there needed to be something that kept the people connected to their church, their faith.  And so it has continued to this day, 5 ½ years, over 2000 reflections.

 

Over that time, I’ve gotten into a kind of a routine – getting up early in the morning, writing the reflection, adding an appropriate picture, posting it and saving it.  Saving it on this little memory stick you see in the attached pic!  At least, that was my routine, until 2 weeks ago!

 

I plugged in my memory stick, like always, and NOTHING happened!  I tried pulling up my files.  NOTHING!  My laptop didn’t even recognize that the stick was plugged in.  All my files, 100’s of them, just suddenly and completely disappeared, gone!  It was devastating!

 

Over the past 2 weeks, Ginger and I spent countless hours looking for ways to recover my files, all to no avail!  They were gone, lost!  And all that time, all I could think about was – stupid me!  All the times I reminded myself – make a backup!  Prepare for the worst possibility!  And I never did!  I told myself – tomorrow, I’ll do it tomorrow!  And tomorrow never came!

 

You can’t just do nothing and expect you can get things done at the last minute!  You have to make a plan and you have to carry it out! You can’t procrastinate and tell yourself – I’ll get to it tomorrow!  You have to prepare! 

 

It’s what we hear in today’s Gospel!  The Kingdom is coming!  The Master is coming!  Be prepared!

 

We don’t know when the Master is coming!  So we have to treat each day as a day of preparation!  Make no mistake – it will take time and effort!  Jesus makes it very clear – this is work and it is daily work. 

 

Gird your loins!  Not an expression most of us are familiar with but very appropriate here.  Literally it means something like hiking up your pants, tightening your belt, rolling up your sleeves, and getting to work!  I keep getting this image of “buckle up, buttercup, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.” 

 

 

 

 

A couple days ago, I plugged this stick one more time into my laptop - mostly out of habit - but there was a little bit of hope and faith that maybe it would come back to life.

 

Amazingly it did exactly that – my laptop pinged in recognition and all my files re-appeared, every single one of them.

 

And this time!  I didn’t waste any time; I backed up the stick, saved everything to the cloud and breathed a big sigh of relief!

 

Being prepared is NOT a part-time job!  Neither is being a Christian!  It all takes time!  It takes effort every day!  And it takes faith!

 

 

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