Today, we hear Jesus tell a very interesting
parable about a servant who is supposed to keep watch all of the time to fend
off robbers from breaking into the master's house. The point of the parable is that we need to
be constantly on guard, as we do not know when Jesus, the Son of Man, will
come.
Just how watchful are we? When I first arrived in the small jungle
village where I served as a missionary in Ecuador, we lived in an apartment on the second floor of our
church building, and we had our apartment broken into constantly. I think robbers broke into it 5 times in the
first few weeks we were there. Well, we
thought we would outsmart these robbers by installing this heavy duty door with
a super strong lock that we thought would be impossible to break into. Well, I remember very clearly that I was
preparing to leave our apartment for a few days on the day before Christmas in
order to spend the holidays with some Peace Corps volunteers that lived in a
neighboring village. I left the
apartment to make some travel preparations, but when I came back about a half
hour later, I noticed that the door was open, which I thought was odd – I was
sure I had closed & locked the door.
When I got closer to the door, I realized that not only was it open, but
that the robbers removed the entire door from its hinges in order to break into
our apartment this time! I was so shocked:
not even our heavy duty door could keep the robbers out!
The point is, we can be vigilant, we
can be on guard, we can make all kinds of preparations and plans, but our best
laid plans can sometimes fail or not go as we think they will. And that is where our faith's call for
constant conversion, for us to always reach out to God for him to be the center
of our lives. This helps us to prepare
for the coming of Christ, it helps us to always be on guard. Sure, our plans will sometimes fail, or
roadblock will get in our way, or we will become distracted in some way, but
our faith always calls us back to Christ, always back to where we belong.
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