It's been a day

Here's anothing run down of a day-in-the-life of this priest.

I awoke this morning at 5:30 to set-up for Mass that would be celebrated by the very generous retired priest in our area during the Pastor's absence.

I then prepared for the day and celebrated Mass at 8:30 with some of the grade school children.

After Mass, I checked my postal mail and set to work on the homily for the funeral Mass that I will celebrate tomorrow morning at our mission parish. I will post this homily shortly.

I then returned to the office to check on messages and, by God's grace, not finding any returned to the rectory for a quick lunch.

After lunch I set to work on a homily for a wedding I will preside over on Saturday.

I then began rearranging my First Friday visits from the morning into the afternoon on account of the funeral.

Having successfully done this in a remarkably short time I set to work on Sunday's homily because there won't be much time tomorrow to devote to it. Having finished about half of the homily I heard confessions for First Friday.

After absolving several penitents, I sat down for a quick supper before going to a wedding rehearsal for the wedding on Saturday.

After what was perhaps the shortest wedding rehearsal in history, I went to the funeral home for the Wake (somehow they were schedule only 30 minutes apart).

When I returned to the rectory, quite exhausted, I found myself humming the battle theme to the original Final Fantasy game on Nintendo Entertainment System, for reasons I do not know.

Conscious that, as Rich Mullins once sang, "there's so much work left to do, but so much you've already done," I simply cannot work any more today. There's nothing left.

It's been a day. And because it has I'm going to relive a bit of my childhood now by playing Final Fantasy III on my Nintendo DS (I don't have the NES here in Effingham). That should keep me awake until bedtime :)