"Forty Day Focus on the Cross"

Day Six

I am always amazed at how long a minute seems when I’m warming something up in the microwave, and how short it is when I say, “just one more minute” while lying in bed not wanting to get up.

If you’re waiting for the clock to say it’s time to leave school or work, it drags on. But if you are with someone you love, or doing something you love, you seem to barely begin and it’s time to be finished. If you are looking forward to a vacation or a weekend away, it feels as if the calendar is stuck in the mud; but once you are on that vacation you blink and the days have flown by and quickly disappeared.

Time is constant, of course. But in certain moments of our life it sure doesn’t feel like it.

The first weekend of Lent has come and gone. One week out of 6 will soon be behind us, and the cross will be one week closer. The question for today is: are you?

Are you closer to the cross than you were a few days ago? Is the magnitude of His sacrifice any more real to you today than a week ago? A year ago? Or maybe 10? Each week of life, as we put a Sunday behind us, and a new week before us, it should have in it a resolve to do more, to know more, to study more, to be more than the in the one before. Each day should put behind it a few more steps of the journey of our faith. Each second should be seen as one more second of this life behind us and one more second closer to Home. Each moment that has a concentration on God in it should be another moment of deeper love and devotion to the one whose every thought and every concern of every single day is all about us.

God doesn’t watch the game and momentarily forget about you. He doesn’t get lost in a good book and stop considering us. God doesn’t get sidetracked in His love for us and stop considering what we need. We are always on His mind.

But us? We have to refocus every day, every hour, every moment. We have to remind ourselves of His will constantly. We get so lost and so distracted and so complacent and so selfish. It only takes a second—a little bauble dangled in front of us and we are caught up again in our trivial little lives and its matters, forgetting totally about the intimacy that God craves with us. He never forgets, never wavers. Us? We so seldom find it and we always seem to be wavering back and forth like a tight-rope walker in a gale force wind.

The cross is closer now. The time is drawing near. Are you?

Onward, my friends. Face to the cross, our back to the world. Every second.