I’m ok Daddy!
Small children, in their innocence, do things out of love not fear, and that’s how God wants us to be with Him …
I made Jesus suffer for me
A decade back, I prayed myself through the Ignatian retreat that the Jesuit father took Mother Teresa through in 1959 (found in appendix B of Come Be my Light). Sometimes the wording he gave in his instructions stood out for me. One such time was his instruction to her that stated, “To spend a day in reparation for the sufferings I have made Jesus bear for me.”
I grew up hearing Jesus suffered for me on the cross. But I’ve never heard I made Jesus suffer for me. Wow, a paradigm shift.
Aging well
I recently read that in the U.S., 10,000 people daily will reach age 65 (retirement age). This begs the question: How prepared am ‘I’ to accept aging?
Outliers
In the secular world, people are characterized as outliers in many ways. Not too long ago, a well-funded and orchestrated protest against the one-percenters of the ultra-high wealthy took place as Occupy Wallstreet. In the world of science and education, the outliers are those with the ultra-high IQ. In this Gospel which we recently heard in mass, Jesus is calling us to belong to a different group of outliers: those who truly love Him.
Finding peace
In 2013, I had a student who at the time directed a regional UN branch in the Democratic Republic of Congo during a time of great upheaval and violence. His job was to negotiate peace. In my student’s experience, a mere four men got 3000+ armed rebels to not only lay down their arms but to also integrate back into the national army. People of faith can do much, much, more.