WEEKLY HOMILY for January 1, 2011: The New Year / A Time for Investing

Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God, Cycle A
St. Mark Church, Fallston
January 1, 2010

The New Year: A Time for Investing
BY NICHOLAS AMATO


86,400 DOLLARS

Imagine for just a minute that your bank credits your checking account with $86,400.

The money is yours to do with whatever you want. The only catch is that the balance does not carry over to the next day.

Whatever money you don’t spend is lost. In other words, whatever is left at the end of the day is deleted from your account.

Then, the next morning your account is again credited with $86,400. So, what would you do?

My guess is that you would quickly discover more and more wonderful things to do with each day’s newly given wealth.

You would quickly learn lots of creative ways to spend or give away every cent every day.


86,400 SECONDS

Okay, now let’s go back to reality. I’m not talking about $86,400 dollars a day but something else we get 86,400 of free every day. Any idea what?

If we do the arithmetic, we easily learn that every day, we are given 86,400 seconds to live. Put another way, God invests 86,400 seconds in each one of us every single day.

Every night, God writes off as a loss whatever of this time we have wasted or not used well.

In the Big Bank of Time, there are no balances that get carried over from one day to the next.

Each day a new 86,400 seconds is poured into our account. Each night at precisely 11:59.59 what remains is lost and gone forever.

No, time cannot be saved for a rainy day. If we fail to make use of today’s deposit, the loss is ours.


SPEND TIME WISELY

The lesson here is that we have to spend our time wisely – a great lesson for today, New Year’s Day.

From an investment point of view, we need to spend our time on items that will hold their value from day to day, month to month, year to year. Regardless of our occupation or vocation, regardless of what we have to do day in and day out, we need to spend our time wisely.

Several ways we can do this include:

➢ Coming closer to God through the Scripture, the Eucharist, and personal prayer and reflection, as we see in Mary in today’s gospel

➢ Tending well the primary relationships in our lives, especially with your spouse or close friend or parents or children

➢ Intentionally working to become more compassionate and more understanding of the situation and feelings of others.

In investing our time on these “things,” we will have no regrets. These items will always hold their value.

In fact, their value will increase and mean more and more to us as time goes on.

Someday we will look back on the time we spent on these investments and say, “That was time well spent.”


CONCLUSION

So, today we begin a New Year – a new and significant segment of time.

The question is: how will we spend our 86,400 seconds each day of the New Year?