There are many things in my life that are routine. I wake up sometime between 5:30am and 6am to pray and have a coffee. I get ready for work. I kiss my wife and my two daughters before I head out the door. I will attend morning mass at my parish and then tackle my ministry related “to do list.” When I get home in the afternoon I usually play with my daughters or prepare dinner. Then we go for a walk as a family and upon returning home we proceed with our bedtime routine with the girls. This is a general snapshot of an average day in my life.
Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash
I got to be real with you. My mind isn’t always focused on the activities at hand out of the ones I mentioned above. Some mornings, my mind is on something important I have to finish at work, so I passively and quickly kiss my wife and girls and quickly shoot an impassionate “I love you” at them. Sometimes when I am playing with my daughters in the evening my mind is on a YoutTube video I’m looking forward to watching after they go to bed.
Early this morning I was sitting with my morning coffee in the silence of our home gazing out at the sun creeping over the horizon. A cliché question popped into my mind as I was listening in prayer. If I knew that I had a short time left to live, but I still had to do the routine things in my life, how would I approach them?
The word “intentional” popped into my mind. To spare you the boredom of reading through my intellectual gymnastics as I processed my thoughts, in short I resolved to focus on the task/activity at hand and nothing more. FULL immersion in all the moments I mentioned above.
Checklist Catholicism
Like the everyday routine moments in our lives, Catholics (including myself) risk the danger of reducing their faith to a list of routine tasks void of significance.