Very few of us have the luxury of coming to the end of a day, even a most productive day and saying, "I have completed all I have set out to do. All is done. Everything is accomplished." Most of us have many more things that need attention. Working in hospitals I remember hearing, "wish the patients would all go home so we could get some paperwork done." Someone once told me, and I am afraid this might have some truth in it, a work is never finished, merely abandoned. And everything takes longer than you think it will and when you finish one job, you realize you have three more to do. A very smart friend of mine writes her "to do" lists in pencil. In that way she can erase anything she did not accomplish and put it on the list for another day. Another friend writes her list at the end of the day and only puts on it the things she actually did accomplish. It took me awhile but I finally found out that on my Palm PDA if I do not complete a task on a particular day I can move it to another day. Very seldom can we sit back and say, it is finished. It is complete. Jesus could and did. Jesus had done everything that God wanted him to do. We continue our work, until we are finished.

Let us speak peace to one another. Peace was the mission of Jesus, the Prince of Peace. The fruit of the Spirit is peace. "Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord (Zechariah 4:6). Peace was the witness of the early church. The new community created in Christ bore witness by its reconciled fellowship: "And all who believed were together and had all things in common"(Acts 2:44-47; 4:32-37)

A pastor went to visit a parishioner who had not come to church in weeks. He'd had a disagreement with someone in church and decided he was not going to go to church anymore. He thought that he did not need church. He could worship God all by himself at home, alone. The parishioner heard his doorbell ring, and although he was surprised, he opened the door and let the pastor come in. Not a word was spoken by either the pastor nor the parishioner. The pastor sat on the couch and the man sat in his chair and they watched the fire burning in the fireplace. Still, neither said a word. A period of time passed. No conversation. Suddenly, the pastor got up and moved toward the fire which was blazing beautifully. He stoked the fire and then removed one of the logs and pushed it aside away from the other blazing logs. He returned to his seat on the couch without saying a word. You know what happened to the fire. It was not long and the lone log went out. It lost its fire. The others were still ablaze. The pastor got up, nodded to the parishioner and left. The next Sunday the parishioner was in church again. He got the message. Like the parishioner, we need to stick together.

The story is told of a man who got a permit to open the first tavern in a small town. The members of the local church were strongly opposed to the bar, so they began to pray that God would intervene. A few days before the tavern was scheduled to open lightning hit the structure and it burned to the ground. The people of the church were surprised but pleased ... until they received notice that the would-be tavern owner was suing them. He contended that their prayers were responsible for the burning of the building. They denied the charge. At the conclusion of the preliminary hearing, the judge wryly remarked, "At this point I don't know what my decision will be, but it seems that the tavern owner believes in the power of prayer and these church people don't."

Restlessness signals God's draw on our lives, and no single commitment curbs that restlessness unless it is oriented to the larger horizon of God's magnetic love. Through vocation, our purpose, our call, God turns our restlessness into rest in God, orients the times of our lives to eternity, to time marked by the presence of God. Restlessness, then, need not threaten either our commitments or our efforts to discern which commitments to make. Because God speaks through our everyday thoughts and encounters, vocation is not an alternative to restlessness, but a way of listening to restlessness.

Sometimes the struggle is a restlessness in the voice of ambition or anxiety: "If I do not write the perfect paper, I will fail, the perfect lecture, I will not get tenure, the perfect blog, I will be criticized." "If I don't have lunch with this friend, right now, I will be alone and friendless the rest of my life." But sometimes restlessness is a voice from deep within, a sense that I will not be myself unless I do precisely this--write a poem, teach a class, walk in the woods. Whether they distress or inspire us, voices of restlessness cannot be ignored.

Our restlessness is like the mysterious stranger who wrestled all night with Jacob before blessing him with a new name, Israel. When we wrestle with that stranger, our own restlessness, God also gives us a name--a vocation, purpose, a call that pulls the energy of our lives in particular directions. God's lure on our respective lives is like a magnet, and restlessness is the lifelong aligning of our own "iron filings"--the many minutes of our time, energy, and attention--to that magnet. As St. Augustine confessed, "Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee," in God.

This persistent wrestling, this struggle, this restlessness is not a new experience. Sixteen hundred years ago, the Christian monks of the Egyptian desert, the Desert Fathers, noticed a similar phenomenon. When they were at work, they felt drawn to prayer; when they prayed, they felt drawn to work; when they settled in one monastery, they became convinced that true spirituality could be found only in the monastery down the road. The monk's task was not to flee from this restlessness, but to stay put and wrestle with it.

I was ever so surprised when I spent a day with the Desert Fathers now living in one monastery in Egypt. They were not what I expected. They were not hermits, living separated from life. No, the monks I spoke with were outgoing, professionals (doctor, engineer, and a mathematician) who had completed their education before entering the monastery. They had a sense of humor. They went off to work each day; some working to transform the desert into farmland with irrigation and others worked in clinics. Each took turns being with the "daily invasion"; they called it; barbarians in the olden days, tourists nowadays. They were historians, good humored, well versed in many religions. In talking and asking questions I learned that they lived in individual cells and would arise each day at 4:00 am to pray. Prayer and vocation were ways they lived with the struggle.

We all wrestle. We struggle with God. Joan Chittister defines struggle well. "The process of struggle is the process of the internal redefinition of the self. People do it in the midst of a marriage that is failing on one set of expectations and in need of being renegotiated around others. People do it when the work they do ceases to be for them what they expected it to be. People do it when they find themselves locked out socially of the very places they want to be in life: in the midst of the dominant culture, in a position of power and authority, in a place of comfort and security. When our expectations run aground of our reality, we begin to rethink the meaning and shape of our lives. We begin to rethink not just our past decisions but our very selves. It is a slow but determining deconstruction of the self so that a real person can be reborn in us, beyond the expectations of others, even beyond our own previously unassailable assumptions. And struggle is its catalyst." "The Hebrew Testament story of Jacob wrestling with God is a model of the process." (Joan Chittister, OSB, Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope: The Nine Gifts of Struggle)

Let us speak peace to one another. Peace was the mission of Jesus, the Prince of Peace. The fruit of the Spirit is peace. "Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord (Zechariah 4:6). Peace was the witness of the early church. The new community created in Christ bore witness by its reconciled fellowship: "And all who believed were together and had all things in common" (Acts 2:44-47; 4:32-37)

More important than choosing the right person to marry is being the right person.

We make choices each day. Choose to love, daily. Love is not just an emotion, a feeling, it is a choice. It's a decision. Love is a choice, a decision we make each day. When you love you: Appreciate. Express gratitude. Recognize who the person is. See them now. (Not just how they were 10 years ago.) Be aware. Recognize changes in them. Fight fair. No digging up stuff from the past when you argue. Fighting is not about history; every thing in the past. It is about the present dilemma. (Fight only about what you are fighting about.) The opposite of love is not hate. Hate is part of love. The opposite of love is apathy, not caring, not feeling. Love and life are not easy.