The life of a middle-class American was busy and full of demands. And she thought to herself, "What should I do, for I can’t keep track of everything and I need to be more efficient to accomplish all that I have to do in the limited time I have?" Then she said, "I will do this: I will trade in my cell phone and my day-timer for an iphone, and there I will store all my demands, my lists, my projects, my calendar, my contacts, both important and occasional, I’ll have information at my fingertips, and even my favorite music and movies – and what’s more, I will be available 24-7 to respond to whatever needs my attention."

It gives new meaning to the words of Ecclesiastes: even at night their minds do not rest.

In the two thousand years since Jesus told this morning’s parable, our lives have gotten infinitely more complex. Although possessions remain an issue for us – the Chicago Tribune reported recently that there are 55,000 self-storage facilities throughout the nation, which means 6.9 square feet of rented storage space for every American – technology has allowed us to take "hoarding" to a new level. We have created "virtual silos" in which we store all the stuff we can’t get rid of - our fears; our depression; our sure and certain belief in our own indispensability; Truth as we see it; our busy-ness; our guilt and accumulated grievances…

I often visualize these as silos constructed out of time – the blocks the minutes and hours of our days, held together with a mortar of anxiety…

After all: a common theme in today’s world is "not enough time!" No silo is big enough to hold all that we need to do! Like the White Rabbit we run around frenetically, muttering under our breath:

I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date!

No time for that now!

Places to go, people to meet!

Gotta hurry! Gotta hurry!

I’m on a dead run!

Not enough hours in the day!

Not on my A-list!

Gotta get to ‘it!

Can’t get it all done!

Statisticians – and our own experience! – tell us that as a nation we are working more – and sleeping less. "Multi-tasking" – what we used to tell our parents we were doing when we tried to watch television while we did our homework! – is no longer a "no-no" but has become normative, even desirable.

If we can attribute value to something on the basis of the time, energy, or attention we give it, what does that tell us about our lives?

There’s a wonderful passage in Dante’s Inferno, when Dante is reacting with pity at the people he sees in Hell, and Virgil, his guide on this journey through the nether regions, admonishes him: "Do not feel pity… they are getting exactly what they want. Hell is the state in which we are barred from receiving what we truly need because of the value we give to what we merely want. It is a condition of ultimate deprivation, that is, poverty."

For many of us, the pace of our lives today puts us in that place of ultimate deprivation and poverty.

Often, we feel poor and deprived – empty, in spite of all that we do or have, and we increase our efforts to fill ourselves.

We need to hear again the wisdom of the Psalmist who says,

We can never ransom ourselves,

Or deliver to God the price of our life…

We don’t realize, perhaps, that the best way to assess our emptiness is to stop.

Not to keep trying to fill it up with more-different-better, but simply to stop.

Stop.

Unplug.

Look: #9; look at, not only what we are doing, but how we are doing it.

Listen: #9; listen for God’s presence in the midst of our lives, presence that may have been drowned out by the ringing/beeping/vibrating demands of our busy-ness.

Stop. Look. Listen. And open ourselves to the possibilities that life does hold for us.

Sometimes it requires the perspective of the rich man in today’s lesson:

This very night your life is being demanded of you, Jesus concludes his parable.

This very night your life is being demanded of you.

There’s something about the immediacy and reality of our own death that casts a harsh light on how we have been living our lives. Unfortunately frequently it is not until we are faced with the end of life as we have known it, that we begin looking at how we have valued that life, what we have done with it. I used to run a support group for women who had cancer, and almost universally they spoke of their cancer as having given them the "gift of life" – the gift of valuing the life they have, the gift of choosing how to spend their time, the gift of letting go of the demands and behaviors which tend to trap us and shape our days.

A truly abundant life, a life lived without the fear of scarcity that causes us to build and stock those silos, whatever form they take, is a life lived in such a way that we are able to see in each day the fresh possibilities of life and grace.

Imagine: God gives us each day the fresh possibilities of life and grace!

Not to keep – like the manna which fed the Israelites, we don’t store these possibilities.

Gives us.

Not a demand, one more thing we have to do, drawing us in yet one more direction, but a gift, to fold into our lives to enrich them.

A gift to be savored and enjoyed!

A gift which remind us of whose we are and to whom we belong.

A gift to remind us of the God who loves us.

And this gift of possibilities and grace is what gives meaning to our lives.

Thoreau said, "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life, which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."

The cost of a thing is the amount of life, which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

How much of our lives do we exchange for things of little value?

What has been the cost of the frenetic way in which we lead today’s lives?

How might we see in each day the fresh possibilities of life and grace?

For those fresh possibilities are there, free and abundant.

All we have to do is be still a moment.

Look.

Listen.

Become aware of God’s presence.

And receive.

Jayber Crow, the main character in a book of the same name by Wendell Berry, looked over his life shortly before his death, and commented, "I am a man who has hoped, in time, that his life, when poured out at the end, would say, ‘Good-good-good-good-good!’ like a gallon jug of the prime local spirit…"

May all our lives, when poured out at the end, say, "Good-good-good-good-good!"

Amen.