10/21/2015 – Wednesday of the 29th week - Luke 12:39-48 – -

     Today, we hear Jesus tell a very interesting parable about a servant who is supposed to keep watch in order 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 those first few weeks we lived there.  I think robbers broke into it 5 times in a less than a month.   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 go to the market to purchase the food and provisions I needed, 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 and 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 and had the door sitting out in the hallway, leaning against the wall.   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, but our best laid plans can sometimes fail or they may 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 a 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.