Happy Independence Day!
I’m away this week on vacation with my family up near Gaylord, enjoying the amazing treasure that is summertime in northern Michigan. Each year, I find myself growing in appreciation for this time spent with my siblings, parents, and my nieces and nephews. My oldest nephew is now an incoming high school freshman and, all of a sudden, is tall with muscles. My oldest niece no longer asks her uncle to pick her up and throw her over my shoulders (which I will most definitely still do anyway). The transition from little kid to big kid is fast, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. But at least my youngest nephew is six, and he will wrestle anyone at any time. His name is Levi, but we call him “Eleven”because it’s the only number on his energy dial.
I’ve recently been contemplating that I’m entering headlong into an interesting new era — maybe you’ve heard of it —it’s called midlife. The biggest clue for me has been the revelation that, in any given social situation, about half the crowd thinks I’m legitimately old, and half the crowd thinks I’m still a spring chicken. Also, in midlife, you can fall asleep healthy and wake up with an injured shoulder. Very strange. Mentally, the foray into midlife spins my brain when math-ing about time which, it turns out, moves at warp speed. And as a pastor, that adds a layer of urgency to everything I pray about regarding the parishes I serve.
Thirty-nine years into life, ten years into priesthood, and two years into the pastorate, I have so many dreams and plans that I wonder if there is enough time to accomplish them all. Perhaps, as we age, we all start coming to this same conclusion. Everything seems to depend on time. It isn’t the dream or the desire or the work that runs out first; it’s the clock that runs out. So this motivates me to work hard and continue to stretch myself. Our dreams are a part of us; they aren’t meant to be left on the table insofar as we can help it. God forbid we lie on our deathbed one day with the words “could have, should have, would have” on our lips.
I especially want to wish you all a happy 250th birthday of our country. None of us has been here for all of it, but at least one of our parishioners, whose name is Larry, is 100 and has been here for 40% of it. Think about that! If you’re over 82, you’ve seen a third of our national history; if you’re over 62, you’ve lived a quarter of it. That’s at least the statistic since 1776. But who we are as Americans is a collective consequence of the dreams dreamed by a nation of dreamers who have taken the risk to pursue those dreams for about the last 530 years. The love and reverence we bear toward our country are rooted in the gratitude we have for the people who have gone before us and paved the way for our lives today.
At this point, we are about 27 generations deep into the American experiment, and God has seen fit in his plan of salvation to now include your dreams and mine in our nation’s history. Will we let the time pass us by? Or will we dream the dreams of God for our families and pray for the time and the strength to accomplish all the plans God has for us?
Fr. Brian