•“…Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.” (1 Samuel 3:10)
•Sacrifice or offering you wished not, but ears open to obedience you gave me. (Psalm 40:7a)
•Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? (1 Corinthians 6:15a)
•“where are you staying?” He said to them, “Come, and you will see.” (John 1:38)

 

•Where is Jesus staying in your life? Have you answered His invitation to “Come and you will see”?
•Do you recognize your capacity to be another Christ for others to receive Jesus through you?
•Do you take time to stop and listen to hear the message the Lord is speaking to you?
•Do you have time to simply &3147;be” and not to always “do”?

We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have—for their usefulness. When man is reduced to his function he is placed in a servile, alienated condition. He exists for someone else or even worse for some thing else. Hence he cannot enjoy life. The ethos of our society certainly places an enormous emphasis on “having fun,” but our whole concept of joy is mendacious because it is servile. Even the fun that we have is for a purpose. It is justified not by its gratuity, its simple celebration of the gift of life, but by its utility.…

Why then aren’t we happy? Because of our servility. The whole celebration is empty because it is “useful.” We have not yet rediscovered the primary usefulness of the useless. From this loss of all sense of being, all capacity to live for the sake of living and praising God, all thankfulness, all “Eucharistic” spirit, comes the awful frustrated restlessness of our world obsessed with “doing” so that even “having fun” becomes a job of work, an operation, a veritable production, even a systematic campaign.<sup>1



1</sup>Merton, Thomas, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Doubleday: New York, 1989, p. 308, 9.