We all need to make the time each and every day to find some place where we can have solitude and pray. It can be in a chapel, a car, a bathroom, walking the dog or whenever. It is difficult for us to do because there is always someone pounding on the door wanting in, wanting to know what we are doing, wanting that same space or wanting us. When we allow our lives to become so filled that any quiet time gets crowded out, any time for prayer is otherwise spent, when God is pushed to the margin, then our thoughts and lives start to spin out of control and we begin to see the world as Job was seeing it in the first reading: everything around us is at best half empty and we can become saturated with negativity. Without that small quiet time we tend to become self-centred as though everything was about us as though we were some pivotal point around which the whole of the universe revolves. Taking some brief time each day to pray and centre ourselves is a small but necessary part of our faith life, if we truly want to live like Jesus. We hear in today's Gospel that it is what Jesus himself did, even though it meant rising early, before the dawn, and sacrificing some well-earned sleep in order to make it happen. If Jesus needed to do this, we are quite foolish to think it is a luxury we can omit.