What Time Is It?

Welcome to Word for the Week, the series in which I:

share my experience of hearing God’s Word in Mass last weekend,
explore what I believe the Lord is calling me to do about that Word, and
ask how this Word might impact your life, as well.

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We still haven’t chosen one home parish. I suppose we’ve selected two “home” parishes. But a pastor friend of mine says that if you choose two, you’re choosing none. In the meantime, lately, whenever we make a conscious choice to attend one, we end up at the other. Typically, it’s because someone in the family is running late.

After missing an earlier, 11am Mass, our family attended an afternoon Mass last Sunday (6-26). It took place close to our 5-yr-old’s nap time. She probably left Mass six times, for various reasons. (“I need a tissue,” or, “I forgot my water bottle but I’m so thirsty!”) It reminded me of when she was a toddler and most of our time at Mass was spent in the vestibule. Those days were so very challenging for me.

I’m grinning a lot about it now.

The Word that stood out to me last Sunday was from the responsorial psalm. It’s only a fragment of a sentence, but that’s all I needed. The phrase was, “even in the night.” In the context of Psalm 16, the prayer is one of trust that God will lead our hearts at every hour, day or night.

As I asked the Lord what to do about this word, I realized that I’m proverbially “in the night” right now. It’s difficult to look out and to forecast the future. The choices that David and I have made recently have been humbling, and progress has felt slow. I am on the road to recovery from disordered eating. But the fruits of this recovery aren't so evident yet.

In prayer, I felt convicted that it’s not time to see the fruit yet. It’s not time to figure everything out or to have “a-ha” moments of what the Lord is bringing about during this break from touring and from public life. Rather, it’s time to rest and to trust that the sun will rise again. In prayer, I also remembered Psalm 30:5, which reads: “At dusk weeping comes for the night; but at dawn there is rejoicing.”

At the end of Psalm 30, we can also learn about how God changes our mourning into dancing, how he trades our sackcloth for gladness.

In what ways are you wearing sackcloth right now? Is there a specific aspect of your life that is “clothed in” (conversely, we might say “disguised as,” or maybe “dressed up as,”) weeping or mourning? If you're wearing sackcloth with me, in one way or another, we can take a tip from the psalmist.

We can recall another time, in the past, when God transformed our sadness into joy.

Maybe at this moment now, we can’t see; it’s too dark. So, even at night, let’s remember what the Lord has done for us in the past. And when the morning comes, we’ll be able to look back to where we are now, and see clearly that He never left us.

Amen.

P.S. I'm ready to choose one home parish. Hopefully by next week's entry, I'll have a decision to report!

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