Angels know there is no time like the present

By Mary Regina Morrell

"Love never fails" (1 Corinthians 13:8).

Several weeks ago I was driving home from Albany on the New York State Thruway when I noticed a car abandoned on the side of the road. It was pretty well mangled - obviously the result of some kind of accident.

It reminded me of the late-night accident one of my sons was in several years ago when he fell asleep at the wheel, ran off the highway and hit an abandoned car, flipping the station wagon he was driving several times before it landed horizontally across Route 287. In addition to everything else the engine caught on fire.

Fortunately, a trucker driving in the other direction saw the accident and turned around just in time to put out the flames with a fire extinguisher he kept in the cab of his truck. How different things might have been if that man hadn't appeared just when he did!

We considered him an angel, and anyone who has had similar experiences knows that angels always seem to show up just in the nick of time.

Just look at the story in the Hebrew Scriptures of Abraham, the father, desiring to be obedient to God by sacrificing his son, Isaac, unaware that God had no intentions of letting that happen. Scriptures relays, "When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son." But then, just in the nick of time, an angel of the Lord called to Abraham, saying, "Abraham! Abraham... Do not lay a hand on the boy...Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son."

Recently, I came across a commentary by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel regarding that same story. He wrote that when he was seven years old, having read about Abraham standing over Isaac with the knife in his hand, "My heart began to beat faster. It actually sobbed with pity for Isaac. 'Why are you crying?' my rabbi asked. 'You know that Isaac was not killed.' " Heschel questioned the rabbi saying, "Suppose the angel had come a second too late?" The rabbi comforted the young boy saying that an angel cannot come late.

But years later Heschel would reflect that while an angel cannot be late, a flesh and blood human being can be.

When I look back at my life I see there were many times when I was too late - with kindness, with charity, with listening, with forgiveness, with love.

Sometimes I was late with the giving, and sometimes with the receiving.

In either case, inevitably I, or someone for whom I cared, suffered needlessly -- all because I couldn't keep time with the angels.

Lessons in lateness are inevitably painful, and always valuable, if we choose to learn from them and the most valuable thing we can learn is to live in the "now" - to give all we can and receive all that is offered in this present moment.

There may be no others.

One more thing I learned from my son's accident - when some part of our lives is in flames, it's foolish to refuse help from the person who brings the fire extinguisher.

_______________________________

Mary Regina Morrell is a Catholic author, columnist and mother of six sons.

Contact

Diocese of Metuchen
http://www.diometuchen.org NJ, US
Mary Regina Morrell - Associate Director, Office of Religious Education, 732 562.1990

Email

mmorrell@diometuchen.org

Keywords

angels, time, love

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