Brief Background:

St. Monica (331–387) was the mother of St. Augustine. She is remembered for her persistent prayer, patience, and trust in God, especially as she prayed for many years for Augustine's conversion. She eventually witnessed his baptism before her death.

Patron Saint of: mothers, wives, widows, difficult marriages, and those praying for children or loved ones who have fallen away from the faith. Her life reminds us: never give up praying for someone—God may still be working in ways we cannot see.

REFLECTION:

This coming Friday, after our School Mākeke event, our freshmen class will have their Freshmen Lock-In at the gym. It is an opportunity for them to build community, spend time together, and have some fun. And, of course, they can choose to stay awake the whole night. I feel for the chaperones and the adults who have to stay awake with them! For the freshmen, staying awake all night probably sounds exciting. For the adults, maybe not so much.

But it made me think about the first words Jesus gives us in today's Gospel: “Stay awake!” Why would we want to stay awake?

Usually, we stay awake because there is something we don't want to miss. As children, maybe we tried to stay awake on Christmas Eve because we couldn't wait for Christmas morning. Maybe we stay awake waiting for someone we love to come home. Sometimes we stay awake watching a good movie because we need to know how it ends. We stay awake because we believe something worth waiting for is coming.

Maybe that's a different way to hear Jesus today. “Stay awake” isn't simply a warning: You better be ready because you don't know when I'm coming. Perhaps it is also an invitation: Stay awake because you don't want to miss what God is doing. In fact, this waiting doesn't mean stopping everything and simply waiting; it means faithfully doing what has been entrusted to us.

And St. Monica is a beautiful example of someone who stayed awake.

She spent years praying for her son Augustine. She watched him wander away from the faith and make choices that must have broken her heart. Yet she kept praying. She kept hoping. She kept believing. In a sense, Monica remained spiritually awake because she refused to believe that God was finished with her son.

Imagine if Monica had eventually said, “Enough. He's never going to change.” She would have missed what God was slowly doing in Augustine's heart. The son she worried about would eventually become St. Augustine.

And perhaps that's the challenge for us who serve in our parish and school. Sometimes we become spiritually sleepy when we stop expecting people to change. We look at a student and think, “I've told you a hundred times already.” We look at a child, a coworker, a parishioner, or someone in our family and think, “They're never going to change.”

That's when Jesus says: Stay awake.

Stay awake because God may still be working in that student. Stay awake because God may still be working in your child. Stay awake because God may still be working in that person you've been praying for. And stay awake because God may still be working in you. And St. Paul gives us the reason in today's first reading: “God is faithful.”

Monica didn't keep hoping because Augustine was always faithful. She kept hoping because God was faithful.

So perhaps today we can ask ourselves: Who have I stopped expecting God to work in? Don't fall asleep on them yet. Keep praying. Keep loving. Keep hoping. Stay awake—not because we should be afraid of what is coming, but because we don't want to miss what God might do next.