"We always have these precious, irreplaceable moments..."

To Your eyes a thousand years are like yesterday, come and gone, or like a watch in the night. ~Psalm 90:4

This God who came to dwell among us, who knew the same servitude we ourselves know, and who, in particular, knew all the boredom of a monotonous life -- may He deign to lighten for us the use we must make of time....  Our Lord, first as a child, then as an adolescent, then as an adult, shows us the true attitude we should have.  We must redeem time, and transform each moment into the will of God realized, that is to say, make an act of love.  All the rest has no importance.  It is not the number nor the grandeur of our actions that counts.  It has nothing to do with breaking records. The time Jesus spent at Nazareth was a slow time, a time of calm and quiet, monotonous, dull, and in the judgment of most people, boring.

Oh, mystery of the hidden life!  Oh, slow days of Jesus and Mary and Joseph, rich, overflowing with the same gestures, accomplished in humility, and performed for the Father in heaven!  Oh, remedy against boredom!

...couldn't we learn to busy ourselves worthily?  Don't we have everything in our heads, in our hearts?  Can't we take advantage of these passing moments which will soon be lost to us for eternity?  Couldn't we grab hold of them and make them yield all the goodness and sweetness and effacement they contain?  Let's never believe we have nothing to do.  We always have these precious, irreplaceable moments, which we would love so much if we could understand that they are fleeting, nevermore to return.  Even the most difficult moments would have an extraordinary delectability if we learned to redeem them instead of always stupidly wanting them to run away.

Let us learn, by the spectacle of a God waiting thirty years in what we would call "doing nothing," the true value of time and in what our dignity consists.  It is certainly not merely going as fast as possible without knowing why, for whom, or toward what.

~Mother Marie des Douleurs, Joy Out of Sorrow

Dear Lord, deliver me from boredom.  In other words, deliver me from myself, for I alone am the source and cause of my boredom.  Teach me the wondrous "mystery of the hidden life" and show me how to redeem every moment of every day as You did, by living with and for the Father, confident of His goodness and secure in His love.  O Jesus, God-with-us!