jan 2020 faithposting
Jan. 1st, 2020 12:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prismaticbleedJesus, you are constantly coming to Your people, even when we fail to see You. In each and every moment that we are blessed to recognize You here and now, give us the courage to leap with joy at Your coming. Amen.
Gosh, this just made me realize– how many people failed to see, know, or recognize Christ while He was hidden in Mary’s womb! Remember that Saint Elizabeth and John the Baptist both felt His Presence assumedly before Mary even showed any notable signs of her divine pregnancy. Their hearts saw Him, recognized Him– what utter bliss! And yet… countless crowds passed Him and His mother by, knowing nothing of the world-changing miracle in their very midst.
O God, even now, You are all around us, hidden and yet clear as day to grace-filled hearts. We pray that we always recognize You and rejoice in that meeting. Open the eyes of our hearts, that we may celebrate the truth of Christmas every day!
And, once you pray, listen. Don’t block your ears. Don’t close your eyes. Listen, even if you’re scared. After all, God’s plan for your life might be the exact opposite of what you had planned for yourself, and it might demand more time, effort, finances, humility, inconveniences, sacrifices, change, upheaval, and general radical trust than you feel you can give or endure. But rest in this truth: God’s will for you is always what’s best for you, and He will carry you both to and through it, for His glory and good purpose.“Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.” (Proverbs 19:21)
Today I challenge you to pray that God reveals His plan for your life to you.
So pray, listen, and then obey. Even if you start with just one tiny, shaky, frightened baby step, make that step with a fierce courage and trust in God regardless, and that timidity will rapidly melt away in the fire of divine love.
Oh, and a note of discernment– if it doesn’t glorify God, and if it doesn’t have love of God as it’s ultimate end and aim, then it’s not His will for your life. Remember this, because the devil will try to confuse and trick you every chance he gets.
God, your plans always prevail. Show me the way You want me to walk, and then graciously help me to do so!
"The seditious mob [at the U.S. Capital] was motivated... by an unholy amalgamation of white supremacy and Christianity."
This is deeply disturbing. TRUE Christianity has nothing to do with idolatrous violence, rage, & mayhem. The fact that Christianity in America has nevertheless become scandalized by such associations makes my heart sick. Please pray for the rioters and the politicians both. Also! You CAN be a baptized Christian and STILL be corrupt. Sin doesn't cancel out your religion-- otherwise Divine Mercy wouldn't be so amazing-- but sin DOES rot your soul, so that your religious affiliation is now a horrid scandal. Christ does NOT take this lightly. REPENT.
Remember that EVERYONE can potentially end up in hell OR heaven. Being a Christian does NOT make you "immune" or “incapable of doing wrong” even if you claim it's “for God." Newsflash: malformed consciences are a thing. Stop, read your Bible, and PRAY about it humbly. Love your enemies.
When the Bible says "do not lean on your own understanding," the Bible is being serious. Your heart is deceitful, your emotions fluctuate, your understanding does not see the overall, big picture. God never lies, God never changes, God knows all. Trust Him.
Humility demands that we actively and constantly acknowledge this. Our emotions, guesses, reasonings, perceptions, and imaginations are constantly falling short of truth, inevitably so. We are wrong and mistaken in our judgements so often it’s honestly laughable– and yet, we stubbornly (and fearfully) insist that “we know what we’re doing.” We really don’t, though. Only God does. And that’s the biggest relief, the most profound reassurance, the deepest peace– the fact that God cannot make mistakes.
So loosen your tight grip on life. Stop hypermanaging the details, stop insisting on your way or the highway. Stop being afraid of failure, and instead surrender every choice to your Father in heaven, who will never fail. Lean on Him like a trusting child, and He will carry you through it all.
Advertising tries to stimulate our sensuous desires, converting luxuries into necessities, but it only intensifies man’s inner misery. The business world is bent on creating hungers which its wares never satisfy, and thus it adds to the frustrations and broken minds of our times.
Archbishop Fulton Sheen, Lift Up Your Heart
The only way out of the beartrap of sensuality is to make up our minds, solemnly and honorably, to desire God alone. If we constantly check our cravings with this pledge, being brutally honest in our motives, then the Spirit will give us the grace to break the chains of luxury– sometimes link by link, but breaking free nevertheless.
Inner misery comes from one thing: seeking happiness in anything other than Christ. Once we humbly realize and admit this– and it does take serious humility to endure that shock of acknowledging our own corrupted desires and decisions– we can turn our hungering hearts to Him at last, all the more fully day by day, and finally experience the true and real joy in God that He’s wanted us to have all along.
Take a hard look at your life right now. Are you feeling hungry, miserable, unsatisfied, unfulfilled? When you feel that pang of luxury and want, turn to God. Remember that this life is temporary and only God is eternal. Look to the roots of your desperate clinging and ask yourself: what is it you truly want? It’s not things, it’s a feeling– the feeling of finally being happy, satisfied, fulfilled, at peace. But you haven’t yet truly acknowledged the fact that this world, being ruled by death, cannot ever give you those things. It’s a scary truth, yes… but only until you remember that God IS those Good Things, and will give them to the heart of those that turn to Him alone as the Source and Giver of them.
No matter what you may be desiring in life right now, God is greater, better, and more beautiful. God is ultimate fulfillment. Turn to Him!
“The crisis of nothingness is a summons to the everything which is God.”— Archbishop Fulton Sheen, Three to Get Married
The raw experience of nothingness– of a sudden collapse into poverty, a scourge of disease, a loss of property, a death of a loved one– such a brutal and absolute encounter with emptiness and the utter inability of this world to satisfy the soul, let alone survive for long in its inevitable ephemerality… this awakens us to the truth. It’s a hard, sudden, shocking awakening, flinging us headlong into the abrupt acknowledgment of Light, only fully knowable now because we have been dragged from such depths of darkness. When we have honestly found ourselves at rock bottom, scrabbling at the dusty walls of a coal cellar, desperate to breathe now that the air is so thin– our tolerance of terror has been exhausted; we can no longer bear the awful weight of nothingness, the paradoxically crushing burden of now knowing, firsthand, that the way of the world is ultimately naught– then we helplessly turn our eyes upwards, desperate for a glimmer of something real, something untarnishable, something other than the fleeting pleasures and phenomena of the physical world. And of course Satan will do his darndest to lie to us in the most grandiose ways during this time, offering floodlights and banquets and golden decorations for our tomb, but none of it ever relieves that hollow feeling, that starvation for something more in a cosmic sense.
God is everything. God is the only “something,” the only real and beautiful and eternal thing. And no matter how long we may have been drowning in “nothing,” crushed under its terrible gravity, the moment we sincerely reach up to God He will take our hand and lift us higher. But how can we reach something– Someone– we do not acknowledge, let alone even know is there? Well, that’s the ironic beauty of it all. Falling into the debasing gutter of emptiness can slingshot us into the yearning for God’s boundless heavens better than anything else. God allows it for that very reason.
Are you currently in a crisis of nothingness? Are you experiencing, right now, the jarring and absolute revelation of just how fleeting the things of this world are? Are your finances failing, is your health declining, are your friends and family leaving, is your life falling apart? Then run to God, the only True and Lasting One, an impregnable stronghold, the very Source of all the peace and hope and light and life that your heart so desperately seeks and needs.
It is only through understanding what nothingness is, that we are able to know What nothingness isn’t.
“The Church is not a continuous phenomenon through history, rather, it is something that has been through a thousand Resurrections after a thousand crucifixions. The bell is always sounding for its execution which, by some great power of God, is everlastingly postponed.”— Archbishop Fulton Sheen, Three to Get Married
I feel that, as God exists outside of time and therefore the Crucifixion and Resurrection are always occurring in a very real sense… it is only fitting that, as Christ’s Body, the Church in time would share in that perpetual dying and rising, always growing closer to God despite all odds, always both hanging on the Cross and rising from the tomb.
It’s something to meditate upon for sure.
My only resolution for this New Year - God is my first priority. I’ve run after people and I desired things. I’ve given importance to each and everything except God. And I’ve learned my lessons. Nothing is permanent and even though I got what I wanted, I’m not happy and there’s always a void or dissatisfaction. I can feel it in my heart that only God can satisfy my soul but I was pretty reluctant to obey him. But, God works in mysterious ways. He let me wander so that I personally experience the difference and now I’m the Prodigal Son who came back to his father. My God didn’t push me and he accepted me just the way I am. His Love is True. His Grace is so Deep. If you’re going through this phase, now is the time to start over. Come to Jesus. Start a New Life. Be Blessed. #ToNewBeginnings
I can echo this prayer so exactly it hurts… but what a paradoxically blissful pain it is, to now realize– quite powerfully– the truth that God is all I ever needed or will need.
No one is guaranteed tomorrow; every moment alive comes from God’s tender mercies. Therefore let us use every one of those moments for His glory, without procrastination, excuse, or timidity!
Let 2020 be the year that you, too, come fully home to God, that you begin to choose Him and His Truth over all else, that you seek Him first with no exceptions or excuses. Let 2020 be the first year of your new life in Christ, living in the unshakable joy of His Presence and spurning the empty entertainment of this fleeting world.
It’s never too late, as long as we are breathing, to return to God. He is always waiting for us with open arms and loving heart.
"For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions." (2 Timothy 4:3)
That time is now.
Furthermore, it’s disturbing how thoroughly those false teachers and itching ears can utterly blind a soul to the fact that they’re living in a “comfortable hell”– lounging in front of the TV while the world burns around them, as it were.
The pain of “enduring sound teaching” is a divine ache, a growing pain, an indication of pruning and healing and breaking out of chains. It’s like a child avoiding a vaccination because they’re afraid of the needle & pinch– understandable, true, but ultimately foolish and dangerous, for without that brief pain, they are at serious risk of suffering far greater pain, perhaps even death, as a result of disease.
Either you endure the blessed ache of conversion, or you numb yourself to the demands of holiness and end up burning later.
Do you want heaven, even if it hurts to get there, or would you rather just have your comfy chair and happy lies in hell?
Sweet Jesus, talking
his melancholy madness,
stood up in the boat
and the sea lay down,silky and sorry.
So everybody was saved
that night.
But you know how it iswhen something
different crosses
the threshold -- the uncles
mutter together,the women walk away,
the young brother begins
to sharpen his knife.
Nobody knows what the soul is.It comes and goes
like the wind over the water --
sometimes, for days,
you don't think of it.
Maybe, after the sermon,
after the multitude was fed,
one or two of them felt
the soul slip forthlike a tremor of pure sunlight
before exhaustion,
that wants to swallow everything,
gripped their bones and left themmiserable and sleepy,
as they are now, forgetting
how the wind tore at the sails
before he rose and talked to it --tender and luminous and demanding
as he always was --
a thousand times more frightening
than the killer storm.
Mary Oliver, “Maybe,” from House of Light (1990)
The fear of God is wrapped up in the realization of Who and What God IS. To have seen that ageless and irresistible power manifest in Jesus– to see the wild terror of nature utterly collapse in obedience to Him– would have made any witness acutely aware of not only His divinity, but also of their own frailty, and the greater reality that encompassed them both.
Remembering Jesus makes it impossible to forget one’s soul– makes it impossible to ignore the truth of sin and mercy and judgment and life after death. Such a recollection can be honestly frightening, to a soul that has been asleep… and so the very reality of Jesus is indeed frightening as well.
The utter majesty of God is a thousand times more frightening than anything. And maybe no human ever can or will know what the soul is. But when we look at Jesus, we become so powerfully aware of both these things. And perhaps, the fact that such a being loves us, is frightening only in its initial incomprehensibility.
It’s this gorgeously dramatic paradox. The very God who both stirs up and silences the hurricanes and tidal waves of our lives, is the same God who yearns to wrap us in His arms with boundless love, even if it takes a typhoon to get us there.
But fear of God is rooted in reverence, and that reverence blooms into love, when we listen to Jesus tell us that this unfathomably great God is Our Father, through Him. This, too, carries a hugely fearful responsibility at first… which, like all else, melts away into love as we humbly admit our childlike helplessness before Him, and run to Him as such.
Devotion to Mary is simply giving her permission to form us into an image of Christ.
The simplicity of this profundity just floored me.
Mary, as our mother, then becomes to us who she literally only was to Jesus Christ. Calling her “mother” then puts us in the position OF her beloved Son, our Savior… and so she will joyfully raise us AS such.
It’s a staggering, humbling honor, a huge responsibility, and an unfathomable grace, to be able to not only grow closer to Christ in this way, but also to have such an opportunity of special intimacy with Him, under His mother’s care, her eyes recognizing Him in us and lovingly forming us into an ever-truer likeness of Him.
Mary was, and is, the mother of Christ. If we love Him, then devotion to her should follow suit.
