Look up. Look around. Look within you.

The road out front stretches north a few miles into a town of roughly eight hundred people. In addition to old houses and a new development, the town offers locals the services of a bank, a post office, a gas station, a car wash, a beauty shop, an insurance agency, two bars and two churches – one Lutheran, one Catholic. I attend the latter.

Immaculate Conception is everything you might expect in a country church. It’s small, with a few dozen pews split down the center by a narrow aisle. Vertical stained glass windows illuminate the side walls while a darkened one hides in the choir loft in back. The altar is small and modestly adorned. Most of the parishioners have a German-sounding surname, as does the pastor. It was Germans who settled these parts after all, so it makes sense that their descendents are still here – faithfully attending Mass every Sunday. Inside the steeple, which rises above the tree line so that one may see its cross from miles away, there’s an electronic carillon that chimes a hymn every evening around the dinner hour.

Robert Schneider is currently pastor; he splits his time between Immaculate Conception and All Saints, a parish with a school fifteen minute’s drive north. By the looks of Fr. Schneider's motorcycle, though, I would guess he makes the trip a bit faster. I've been listening to Robert Schneider's reflections on the gospel for the past year and have not once left the building disappointed; he is articulate, insightful and unafraid to challenge the people who've congregated in his midst.

A few weeks back, Fr. Schneider posed an interesting question. If you knew you were going to die at midnight, he asked, would you choose to live the day differently? His point was not lost on me — a woman in transition. I knew exactly how I would respond to this hypothetic scenario. I knew exactly what I would do, where I would go, and who I would want to talk to. I also knew where I would sit to watch my final sunset. Four Cedars Farms certainly would be the stage on which I'd play out the last act of my life.

The trouble is I'm deep in transition; I spend too many days too far from this farm. What's more, too many of the people I love and whom with I'd want to have that great final conversation — share my final sunset — don't know the way to this farm by heart.

Of course, none of us will get advance notice of our demise. Most of us proceed through our days assuming that there will be enough time to get the order in our lives right. Yet none of us are guaranteed unlimited days, ample time, so none of us should be squandering our precious hours. Which was precisely Fr. Schneider's point. If we haven't yet arranged our lives in a way that we will be at peace if we learned our next hour would be our last, we need to make some changes. I'm working on that.