Our wickedness shall not overpower the unspeakable goodness and mercy of God; our dullness shall not overpower God’s
wisdom, nor our infirmity God’s omnipotence.
- John of Kronstadt
(God’s kingdom come, God’s will be done, on earth as in heaven.) |
ACTS 22:3-16; PS 117:1BC, 2
MK
16:15-18
Jesus appeared to the Eleven and said to them:
"Go into the whole world
and proclaim the Gospel to every creature.
Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved;
whoever does not believe will be condemned.
These signs will accompany those who believe:
in my name they will drive out
demons,
they will speak new languages.
They will pick up serpents with their hands,
and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them.
They will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover."
Reflection on the
Scriptures |
Christianity is about the daily, small conversions we encounter. Those somewhat innocuous and incarnational moments on a Tuesday afternoon in the midst of raising kids, paying bills, and working jobs when we get to make the choice to say “yes!” to God’s invitation to do all of that from a place of love. It is this slow burn of joy that leads us to live life differently. Once we have this, how
can we possibly keep it to ourselves! As a colleague of mine likes to say, “God moments are meant to be shared not kept.” No wonder Jesus came back from the dead to give the disciples a swift kick in the butt to go out and tell the world about this new way of being!
Pope Francis tells our world the same. He implores us to evangelize with the joy we discover in our relationship with God. In Evangelii Gaudium, he writes, “We become fully human when we become more than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves in order to attain the fullest truth of our being. Here we find the source and inspiration of all our efforts at evangelization.
- by Kyle Lierk Revelations of Divine
Love - by Julian of Norwich
Fourteenth Revelation, Chapter 46
“We fail oftentimes of the sight of Him, and anon we fall into our self, and then find we no
feeling of right,—nought but contrariness that is in our self”
But how I understood and saw of the work of mercy, I shall tell somewhat, as God will give me grace. I understood this: Man is changeable in this life, and by frailty and overcoming falleth into sin: he is weak and unwise of himself, and also his will is overlaid. And in this time he is in tempest and in sorrow and woe; and the cause is blindness: for he seeth not God. For if he saw God
continually, he should have no mischievous feeling, nor any manner of motion or yearning that serveth to sin.
Thus saw I, and felt in the same time; and methought that the sight and the feeling was high and plenteous and gracious in comparison with that which our common feeling is in this life; but yet I thought it was but small and low in comparison with the great desire that the soul hath to see God.
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