"Get busy, people!"

This is one of my all time favorite incidents from the New Testament. Here are these guys standing around with their mouths agape in wonder and awe, when this Angel comes along to say, "Don't you have work to do? Get busy, people!"

It appeals to me for very obvious reasons: I'm a busy mom. Although I try not to be fruitlessly busy or overly busy, my wonderful and awesome moments are necessarily brief. Five little angels are constantly calling me back to the world of duties and obligations, even when they themselves are the reason I am standing stunned (in awe or in apoplexy--hang that concupiscence!).

I particularly like the implications of this story. The visual work of conversions and baptisms doesn't get rolling until Pentecost--11 days from now (counting today). So the important work they were being called to do first was prayer. Sometimes half the battle, or most likely all of the battle, is that interior one of getting your mind fit for the task at hand.

My job is like that. What I consider important is the clean house, the well fed tummies, the fresh diaper, but all of this is merely detail. My real job is to love, and love is both a decision and an action. It is oftentimes an interior attitude adjustment that lets me smile in the place of a frown, sigh in the place of a shout. My real vocation is to be a good wife and mother who turns her whims and fancies into gifts of herself. My first job is prayer. My second is love, and all that that entails.

Although I have yet to live in a diocese that celebrates Ascension Thursday on Thursday--here in Amarillo we move this celebration to this coming up Sunday--I wanted to honor the day.