This is the last Friday in the winter portion of what is known in our church as ordinary time. I am so grateful to God that this new job is affording me the opportunity to give more time and attention to this apostolate. The results sure have been manifest with 4,000 hits in the past week.
I'm grateful and excited about that, of course but I'm even more excited about what He is doing through this apostolate and the people directly involved with it and partnered with it.
The contributions that William Hemsworth, Ken Litchfield, Richard Pettys, Luke Haskell, Cherry Mallorca and Luis Ogando have been making in various ways are extraordinary and the richness and diversity of our contents is engaging and exciting.
Most of all, I am enthralled at where God is taking me in my personal journey of faith in the understanding that heavy crosses in life do not mean God has abandoned you. As each day goes by, I am more and more focused on this fall trip that I see as recentering my entire spiritual GPS.
As I move towards this trip, the excitement of entering into Lent, Triduum and Easter is larger than life and I have a thrill inside me about the opportunity to learn to live more disciplined, more humble, more obedient and more Christ-like.
The next Friday of ordinary time will be June 13th and that will be almost exactly 3 months until the trip leaves. Knowing that I can do nothing on my own, I humbly beseech Our Lord to use that time to make in me a whole new person.
Of course, saying it is one thing and doing it is another and the temptations and weaknesses of our fallen nature make it a true battle. For this reason, God puts in our path disagreeable and vile people so we may learn to have compassion towards them and pray for them and hope for God's mercy for them rather than His Justice.
It is difficult to plead for mercy for someone who you feel deserves to be put feet first into a wood chipper. That is the calling of the Christian. It is absolutely necessary that we be aware of our sins and truly repentant but that's not enough.
To be a follower of Christ is to believe the unbelievable, hope for the hopeless, love the unlovable, bear the unbearable and forgive the unforgivable. The only way to do that is through the reception of grace which can only be done by humility and mortification. It sure is not easy but it is the priceless treasure worth seeking. Lent is a big part of that joyful climb. It starts Wednesday.
Comments