by The Face of Grace Project | Feb 20, 2021 | Presence
When my niece was little, she would spit her chewed up candy into her hand and offer it to me with be biggest smile only outdone by the gleam of joy and excitement in her eyes. She was so sure I would understand how wonderful these are, and she couldn’t keep her joy to herself. It was easy to control my gag reflex because the love driving her desire to share was so all-encompassing! With reflection I realized my heart is mangled like that chewed up candy, and too much of my life has been spent hiding it from God. I finally came to learn that if I offer it to Him with that same purity of intent and desire to love as an innocent child, He responds with great affection.
God doesn’t have a gag reflex; he understands. There is nothing to hide.
by The Face of Grace Project | Feb 17, 2021 | Presence
Lent is more than a period of atonement for sin. Sincere atonement requires change. People just don’t like change, and the call to holiness is precisely that: change.
Once the desire to change is embraced, it can be difficult to keep our eye on the prize. With the cycle of shame keeping a person convinced of their shortcomings and unworthiness, it is difficult to see themselves for anything other than their faults. We make our brokenness our identity. God desires us to detach from the need to be perfect so that our efforts to reject temptation and overcome weaknesses are ordered towards loving and desiring Him.
As St. Francis of Assisi teaches us, our nothingness is the free space where God creates. This is the simplicity of Lent, making room for God.
by The Face of Grace Project | Feb 14, 2021 | Presence
For 16 years I was blessed with Blossom, our little Yorkshire Terrier who made me laugh every day. To keep us from leaving home without her, she would hide with her head and shoulders under my bed and her rump still out in the open. It was so funny to see this little five-pound Yorkie butt sticking up in the air. Meanwhile, she couldn’t see us so she assumed we couldn’t see her.
This is how we are with God too. Adam and Eve hid in the woods—did they really think God couldn’t see them? I have my default hiding spots, too, that I fall into when avoiding a ‘hard conversation’ with God…do I really think He can’t see me?
Perhaps the greatest change we can make this Lent is a new perspective. 😊
by The Face of Grace Project | Feb 9, 2021 | Life, Work and the World
Twenty-five years ago, a Catholic parish in Arizona had a conundrum serving its mostly immigrant farm-working community. As the immigrants travel the circuit, their children are not in place long enough to be properly educated, including religious education. Two nuns asked a local farmer for permission to use his barn to give religion class to the children while their parents worked, to which he agreed. It eventually morphed to nuns coming back in the evenings to catechize the adults as well. This is the way of proper Catholic action, people helping one another. We have lost sight of this as our vision is distracted by a polarized mentality fueled by the media. It is a heritage and a freedom we risk losing altogether.
It is important that we take part in public discourse promoting the intrinsic value of life at all stages and ages from conception to natural death. However, that discourse needs to be the outcome of a lived faith. A lived faith is one that changes us, the believers.
by The Face of Grace Project | Feb 7, 2021 | Presence
Lent is less than two weeks away…yikes! Many of us are taking to heart how we can let this special season be a catapult to change in our life. Maybe I’ll finally become holy?
Sometimes, however, the path to holiness looks more like the child’s game Candyland than it does the Yellow Brick Road from the Wizard of Oz fame! Filled with peppermint sticks, gumdrops and Grandma Nutt’s peanut brittle (all God’s grace), we forge ahead. But alas, we take an easier choice and land in the cherry pitfall for a while. With God’s grace, however, we persevere straight through the Ice Cream Floats and can see King Kandy’s Castle ahead, only to get stuck in the Molasses Swamp. That one takes a real purging of ourselves to ‘lighten the load’ of our souls.
The purpose of Lent is to prepare us for Easter, the Resurrection. If we let God have His way, it can become His resurrection in us, bringing us new life. Let’s build a Lenten plan that cleans the junk out of the soul so that God can move in. 😊
