Extra baggage?

It rained heavily this morning. When I woke up at 6 am, my first worry is whether I can get to church without drowning my poor Viva. As it was still dark, I can’t see the road ahead and I do not want to drive into a puddle of water and ‘mati engine’. There were fleeting, wicked thoughts of calling the first lector and tell her to do it for me. But hey, that’s cheating.

Actually, it was my bad mistake. I mixed up my own lector’s duty and only discovered on Saturday morning that I am supposed to read on Sunday morning. Usually, I take a week to practice. Thank God the passage of St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is rather straight forward and there are no tongue twisters or hard words to pronounce.

So, with the worries of driving into flood waters and the lector’s duty, I absent-mindedly slipped into my flip-flops and went to church. While going up the steps to the altar, I was talking to myself, ‘Hey, don’t look at my feet, don’t look at my feet’ because I know if I am on 6 pm or 10 am duty, someone is going to tell me ‘Hey, Lilian, you know we lectors aren’t supposed to wear slippers. We are proclaiming the Word of God, and today is Bible Sunday.’

Thank God my reading went well eventhough there is a longer passage than what I prepared from the ‘green book’. So, I got back to my pew, feeling relieved.

During homily, Father Fab talked about extra baggages. The Gospel reading was from Mark and it is about Jesus sending His disciples without extra tunic. Father Fab has a nice way of putting it, i.e. we shouldn’t carry too much baggage if we are serious in becoming His disciples. None of those uptight stuffs like who is wearing flip-flops, who is praying the rosary every day, doctrine teachings and etc.

I have never thought about that. Indeed, many times I have been weighted down in moving forward, in putting my total trust in the Lord when I have all the ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ of being Catholic-ky and churchie stamped all over me. All of us have that hang-ups of wanting to be extra holy-moly and didn’t get into the deeper water.

So, I am going to remind myself to be less uptight about the hierarchy thingie and pick up the phone and call the big A. With the Lord’s guidance, I am very sure I can make some sense of things and sort them out.