With Every Breath I Take

 Starting a new year we can sometimes need to pause and take a breath. There seem to be so many things that are added to our agenda that our minds might feel like exploding with information and tasks that we need to undertake. There can be a focus on the many things that besiege us and that seek to question where we find our worth. Is it the years we have lived, the money we make, or the experiences that we have accumulated? They can be a sense in which we are dragged along from morning to night just taking on one thing after another. Yet it raises the question of what we focus is it on suffering or what makes us joyful.

Paul reflects on this in his letter to the Corinthians where he examines what we preach with our lives. This is not just about trying to measure the worth of the Gospel by how much we work, how much we earn, or how much time we spend on a particular project. Rather he looks at how we surrender ourselves each day to the Good News that frees us up to grow in relationship with God and each other. This helps us to reexamine each day what it is that we are seeking to live in our daily lives. That we are called to share in the blessings of the Good News.

In the Gospel, we notice a similar reflection on whether it is the busyness of daily life or how we find space to focus on what is important not just what is urgent. Thus we do not find our worth just in who seeks us out but in the time when we can be renewed and recreated each day. Thus we seek to become people who prayerfully reflect on who we are called to be and how we can become present in our activity. In allowing us to be at home with God our lives do not become an endless list of tasks or activities. We open ourselves up to God who transforms our lives into Good News.