There’s a living thing living in my apartment. It’s hung on the wall for over thirty years because I was too cheap to purchase the floor version. It’s the fourth living thing in my apartment after counting my two cats and, of course, me.

My grandfather clock only tells me the kinda present time. It’s pretty close at keeping time but, interestingly, cannot keep time. It doesn’t show my past minutes, months, or years, and I can’t shake it upside down to show me my life’s remaining grains.

Work had its time. The old adage declared that “in work you controlled time,” and now, in retirement, “time controls you.” A friend dismissed that when she stated that your thirty-minute lunch was matched by your thirty extra minutes of work. So much for age-old adages.

After a lingering illness at death, it is often heard, “It was time.” That I get. What I don’t get after these many years of priestly life is the timeless line, “God called her.” Nice verb, but isn’t that murder in most states? Our busy God involved with the businesses of the whole world pronounces that Tuesday, Nancy will become a timed person. It may be a comforting comment to survivors that God takes a life that He gave, but it’s a very lazy theology.

My clock’s sole living purpose is reminding me that it’s time to leave for something or it’s time for the nightly news and “Jeopardy.” Reminding me helps if I remember to weekly wind it. Those ticks are my clock’s trying to keep up with time, and its tocks attempt to stop time. “Tockings” are the past, and my hanging pendulum friend can only declare both. Those “tockings” are my doing even though “you can’t turn back the hands of” you know what. That clinging to “tocking” feelings and thinking can question our present precious purpose in life. Life’s undones and misses can easily fill those silent holes in-betweens of a clinking clock. Why? Because sometimes it is easier to “tock” when we need to “tick.” “Tocking” is useless, non-productive, and certainly never healthy.

In faith, those ticks and tocks are called prayer about ourselves, those we love and the unknown people on the nightly news. Tocks alone is just plain garbage.

Interestingly, we say, “back and forth” when talking about time. When it fact it’s the opposite. Tick is forth and Tock is back. Our prayers need only be about the “ticks” in our lives – forth. And, if necessary, seeking mercy for the “tock’s” of our lives which is back.

My cats only tick through every minute of life.the guidance and love of God is the watchful eye of the watch keeper that is in each of us. As the angel John Cameron Swayze told us countless times, “It’s the watch that keeps on ticking.”