What’s the number one reason people give for not going to Mass on Sunday?
You know, fewer people go to Mass on Sundays in our country today than 50 years ago. You know what the number one reason is? I almost always hear this: “Father, I don’t have time.”
Think about that. I don’t have time.
As human beings, that’s the only thing we do have, but we just don’t know how much of it we have. We’re all free to decide how we use our time. I have a friend who’s often on Relevant Radio. He’s a brilliant professor, Harry Kramer from Northwestern University, and he wrote a book called “My 168.” I knew exactly what 168 meant: it’s the number of hours in a week. 24 hours in a day times seven days is 168.
If God asks you to give one hour a week to come worship and to thank Him at Sunday Mass, one hour out of 168, what percentage of your time is that? It’s less than 1%. Imagine you’re walking down the street and a beggar says, “Can you give me a penny?” And you say, “I only have 168 of them?”
That’s all God is asking for. Give Him a penny. God is continuously creating time. We all think of time as sort of a linear dimension: there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week. And you can’t expand time, and you can’t compress time. That’s true. You cannot compress time or expand time. But God can, because He is continuously creating time and He can arrange the circumstances and events of your life so that if you put Him first, you’ll find that you’ve got plenty of time to do everything else you need to do.
I remember one time I was driving down to Chicago and I thought, “You know, I need to finish my prayers in the Breviary.” But if I did that, the traffic jam on the Kennedy Expressway will be a mess. But that day I prevailed. I sat down in the chapel, finished my prayers and left 15 minutes later. I got on the Kennedy Expressway that Friday afternoon and there was no traffic. Kennedy Expressway, how does that happen?
God is in control of circumstances and events. And when we put Him first, He expands all the time that we need to do what we need to do.
And I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the people who showed up for Jesus in Indianapolis last summer: 65,000. Thank you, and be sure to watch for another Eucharistic Encounter next week, and may God bless you!
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