Ostium Catholic

Ecclesiastes today addresses someone at exactly the life stage most of this property's readers occupy - young enough that the body's eventual decline described in vivid detail later in the passage still feels theoretical, established enough to have real choices about how to spend the years currently available. The instruction is specific: remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come. Not eventually. Now, while the habit is still cheap to build.

There's a version of this that plays out predictably in a career-focused decade: faith gets treated as something to return to once things settle down - once the promotion lands, once the relationship stabilizes, once there's finally margin. Ecclesiastes' argument against that sequencing is practical rather than moral. The text describes physical and mental capacities that erode with time, and the same logic applies to spiritual habit formation. A practice built at twenty-eight compounds for decades. The identical practice, delayed to fifty-eight, has far less runway to become anything more than a late correction.

The Gospel gives the same urgency in a different register. Jesus tells his disciples something important, plainly, and they don't understand and are afraid to ask. That fear of asking the real question - about faith, about mortality, about what actually matters underneath the career - is a recognizable failure mode at this stage too. It's easier to stay busy with what's measurable and keep deferring the harder, less measurable question indefinitely.

Name one spiritual practice you've been telling yourself you'll build "once things settle down." Start the smallest possible version of it this week, on the assumption that things settling down is not actually a reliable plan.

Lord, I keep deferring the real question to a more convenient season that may never arrive. Remember me now, and give me the honesty to remember you back, before waiting becomes its own kind of answer. Amen.