Thoughts on opportunity

There were a lot of banned words in the Kelly house growing up in Sydney, Australia, with my seven brothers. Hate was one of them. It was a word that just was not acceptable to be used. My mother and my father just did not tolerate the use of the word hate. There were a few of them—maybe half a dozen of them.
And so hate hasn't played a role really in my life, or in my vocabulary. But there is one thing I hate. And that is waking up to an alarm clock. It's disturbing. It’s alarming. I mean, who even came up with the idea, not to mention the name?
You know, in the book, I talk about, “Alarm suggests fright, fear, chaos, confusion, and looming catastrophe.” Well that's a great way to start the day, isn't it?
I hate waking up to an alarm clock. So I renamed it. It's an opportunity clock. The alarm clock goes off every day; it's an opportunity clock. And in many ways, that's our first moment of victory or failure in the day. It's the first moment of freedom or slavery, you know? Because how often do we just slap the snooze button? We just had our first failure of the day.
But every morning that opportunity clock goes off, you've got another day. You've got another day—and there's a lot of people who don't. So when that opportunity clock goes off each morning, we should be bounding out of bed, ready to go out into the world to love, to give, to serve, and to spread the contagious joy that God is constantly trying to fill our hearts with through every aspect of our spirituality.
I hope you never, ever, wake up to an alarm clock ever again.

Matthew Kelly