Stirring times

This coming Sunday was known for many a year as "Stir up Sunday" because of the words of the collect...which was popularly believed to be an injunction to get on with making the Christmas pudding, if it hadn't been maturing gently for the past year anyway.
As a domestic disaster, I've never even thought of making my own Christmas pud, though I do attempt a cake every few years. I do, though, wonder what the collect might encourage me to do.
I'm so good at procrastinating. Again and again, things linger undone because though I know I ought to get on with them, I just don't have the will to do them.
Mostly, I think, those things I neglect are administrivia - but I'm sure there are other more significant omissions, things that would really make a difference if I could actually get on and do them. One risk of having much too much to do is that you can lapse into inertia. Knowing you can't possibly get it all done, you detach yourself from the process of trying to do any of it...Time, surely, to pray the Collect that has been set for the last Sunday before Advent ever since Cranmer's prayer book.
Plenteous fruits and plenteous rewards are surely quite encough justification for a little bit of stirring...

"Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people;
that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded."