Iron & 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 and the days of Lot in the plainest terms: people eating, drinking, marrying, buying, selling, planting, building, going about ordinary business right up until the flood came and the fire fell. Nothing wicked about eating or marrying or building. What condemned no one, brother, was simply that they were so occupied with the ordinary that they never looked up until it was already too late to.

Frances Xavier Cabrini, remembered today, spent her life on the opposite instinct. She 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 across two continents before she died, never once treating the ordinary work in front of her as beneath the larger call she'd first imagined for herself.

John's second letter, read tonight, is short and urgent: 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 their ordinary lives around him. It's a call to keep watching even while doing the ordinary things, because the flood does not announce itself in advance, and a man who's stopped watching is exactly the man it catches by surprise.

Name one ordinary part of your week - work, errands, routine - and do it today with the same attentiveness Noah kept while everyone around him went on as usual. 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.