The Barn

It’s 9:08 on a Saturday morning, and I am too darn busy for confession.

I’ve probably written before about how hard I find it to get to confession — I say ‘probably’ because I really can’t remember. I whine about it so frequently that it’s hard to tell if I’ve made it the subject of a written piece or if it is simply an oft-recited refrain from the Litany of Colleen’s Perpetual Complaints.

During the week, it’s tough to get to confession because I have little kids who are attached to me like Velcro, and I don’t need them listening in on (and eventually repeating to everyone) my sins. On the weekend it’s a little easier, but our parish doesn’t offer it before or after Sunday Mass, just on Saturdays. Saturday is when I get most of my work done, so getting absolution usually comes at the expense of productivity.

And that, friends, right here, is my barn. Productivity. That’s the proverbial storehouse of my earthly harvest. For the rich man in the parable, it’s a literal barn, filled to bursting with sellable crops. For you it might be money or your job title or what your life looks like to other people on social media. For me, it’s Getting Things Done. That’s my barn, the repository that holds the whole of my worldly preoccupations.

And it’s so full I want to tear it down and build a new one. A bigger one. One that can hold more worry, more time for work, more focus on output and crossing things off a to-do list. Vanity of vanities, indeed.

If I die tonight, the deadlines will go unmet, and no one will even notice. But God, when He meets me in the world to come, will surely ask me why I couldn’t take 45 minutes to accept a gift He tried again and again to give me.

I have to burn the barn, friends. I don’t want to, but I have to. I’m closing my laptop and going to church.

©LPi