What Are Your Chapel Bells?

October 10, 2025 // Friday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time

Read the Word // Open your Bible to today’s First Reading: Joel 1:13-15; 2:1-2

Reflect on the Word // 

The chapel bell cut into our morning work, a clear chime amidst the silence of the cloister. I knelt in a side garden with a Sister, making space in the soil for baby strawberry plants. The next hole was ready and waiting for one of our last plants; we had only to place it in the ground and pat the dirt about its roots.

As Sister rested her shovel, I broke the quiet, asking if we should quickly plant the seedling before going. But she told me that we would leave it until tomorrow. She was being called into the house of the Lord, and she went—evidently with the conviction that everything else could wait.

“Into the house of the Lord, your God, and cry to the Lord!” the prophet Joel urges in today’s First Reading (Joel 1:14). “Blow the trumpet in Zion, sound the alarm on my holy mountain!” (Joel 2:1) It is a call to action that sounds urgent, dark, demanding. It is not the sort of gentle invitation that I would admittedly prefer. I like to be slowly romanced rather than rushed into anything—and certainly not into repentance.

But what I witnessed that morning, on a different “holy mountain” out in California, was a woman who heard the urgency of the bell as the demand of love. She didn’t procrastinate, she didn’t panic, she just said yes.

Today’s First Reading reminds me of this Sister, and I remember that love is demanding. “The house of your God is deprived of offering and libation” (Joel 1:13). How often do I still hold parts of my life back from God? But He loves me so much that He wants my heart to belong to Him entirely—whatever that takes.

What are the offerings of which we, too, deprive the Lord? Perhaps we can rethink the small inconveniences: the chores, the phone calls, the unexpected requests of others. What if these interruptions are not merely a chaos of alarms and trumpets, but are our own mid-day prayer bells, calling us to love? Today, may we be willing to lay aside our own plans in order to respond.

Relate to the Lord // What does love demand of you today? How can you respond promptly and joyfully to the Lord?

About Monica Weinkopf

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Monica Weinkopf is serving as a FOCUS missionary in Nebraska and happily getting to know the Midwest. She is occasionally a wedding photographer and she is always down for a deep talk. Born and raised in Southern California, she loves sunrise runs, beach days, and praying outside.