Our Days Are Numbered

There was an old woman tossed up in a basket, seventeen times as high as the moon.

Where she was going, I couldn’t but ask it, For in her hand she carried a broom.

“Old Woman, old woman, old woman,” said I, “Where are you going, up so high?”

“To brush the cobwebs off of the sky.”

“May I go with you?”

“Yes, by and by.”

The message in that little “Mother Goose” fairy tale rhyme is not unlike Jesus’ warning in today’s Gospel Lesson. Each of us, by-and-by, will come to her or his last turn around the sun. Each of us will be going up to brush the cobwebs off the sky. Each of us will die — and that’s no fairy tale! “Keep your eyes open, for you know not the day or the hour,” Jesus warns us (Mt. 25:13). We mustn’t pretend that it’s not going to happen. We need to face this reality, openly…