Long Weekends and Short-Sightedness

I was continuing to read The Ascetic of Love this morning and was contemplating my seemingly infinite capacity for anxious thoughts. Weekends, especially long weekends, bring this up for me. Weekends, with their hyperventilated promises of peace, productivity, and pleasure never deliver the goods. Why is that? Why do I always emerge from the other side of a weekend feeling disappointed, a little beat up and almost happy to go back to the routine that temporarily keeps my anxious thoughts in check? Mother Gavrilia wasn’t exactly thinking of this particular issue when she wrote the following – but somewhere in the depths of my soul I realized it applied:

We are in a hurry because life is short and because we believe we should have everything here. If we believed that going over there, to Eternity, is almost like going from here to the U.S.A., then we would not be in such a hurry. For we would know that we could do the rest… over there!
-from "The Ascetic of Love", pg. 203

God forgive me, because I am still a materialist. I don’t really believe in the continuity between my earthly life and the life I will lead after my body decomposes and is resurrected. I’m still trying to accomplish everything now – as if there is no Eternity. The older I’ve gotten, the more onerous this has become because I realize I’m running out of time (in this life). Death, wields time like a cattle-prod to herd all us materialists into a noisy crowd of frenzied souls. Time, which is given to us by a good God who wants us to come to our senses, becomes the enemy of materialists.

Mother Gavrilia stresses over and over again the need to trust in "God’s will" rather than "my will." Until that becomes the constant state of my heart - my anxious thoughts, which in reality are expressions of fear of death – will keep me perpetually materialistic. Pettiness, anger, frustration, cynicism, etc. are the bitter fruits of self-will, self-trust, and a lack of vision of God . Short-sightedness makes for very long weekends.