Vessel & Altar

"As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be in the days of the Son of Man." - Luke 17:26

Jesus describes the days of Noah in the plainest terms: people eating, drinking, marrying, buying, selling, right up until the flood came. Nothing wicked about any of it. What condemned no one, Sister, was that they were so occupied with the ordinary they never looked up until it was too late.

Frances Xavier Cabrini, remembered today, wanted to be a missionary to China. The pope sent her west instead, to serve Italian immigrants arriving in America with almost nothing. She built sixty-seven hospitals, schools, and orphanages before she died, never treating the ordinary work in front of her as smaller than the call she'd first imagined.

You are being carried home by every prayer still said for you, and those who went before you are being carried home by your prayers.

Cabrini never got the missionary assignment she originally wanted, and treated the one she actually got as no smaller a calling. Hold onto that when your own life looks different from what you once pictured for it.

John's short letter is urgent and short: whoever does not remain in the teaching of Christ does not have God. It's not a call to abandon ordinary life - Noah kept building his boat while everyone else kept building theirs around him. It's a call to keep watching even while doing the ordinary things in front of you today.

Name one ordinary part of your week - work, errands, routine - and do it today with the same attentiveness Noah kept while building. Watch while you work, instead of choosing one or the other.

Lord, let me build the boat while I still go about ordinary business, and let me not be caught the way the days of Noah caught the ones who never looked up. Amen.