Deuteronomy 6:2-6 / Psalm 18 / Hebrews 7:23-28 / Mark 12:28b-34
I just want to start by saying thanks to everyone who was praying for me on the parish mission in Cedar Rapids earlier in the week, it went really great and there were some good healings.
One lady came up to me at the very end and told me “I just have to tell you, I had arthritis in my hands and it all went away, and I was going to have knee replacements soon but my knees are feeling great, I’m healed, so thank you for your ministry.” And I said “Thank you so much for sharing, it’s a great testimony, now can I get that on video?” And she was like “No, absolutely not.”
But yeah, really good mission, lots of stories like that, and the testimonies make a difference. Before my talk, Dcn. Dan Rouse got up and shared about how he had lesions on his brain, including one the size of an almond, but then he came to my last healing mission at Nativity and he was healed, he even showed pictures of his brain, before and after. When his oncologist saw the pictures, she asked if he was going somewhere else for a doctor, and he said he had only went to God, so that was a great lead into my talk.
Also I felt at peace the entire time. There was something different about this one, usually I get kind of stressed out, but this one, very peaceful, and my talk went really well on Monday, so thanks again for your prayers.
Someone asked me what the best part was for me, and as I thought about it, the best part was actually Team Mass before the Mission on the last day. There were 5 priests there but I drew the short straw and got assigned to be the celebrant and preach, and it was really a good Holy Spirit inspired Homily.
The core of my message then was we have to be humble to let God work through us in this healing ministry, which is a ministry of love for our neighbors.
And as I think about it, this is what happens when we live Jesus’s message in the Gospel. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself. There is no greater commandment than these.
If we take an honest look at our lives, Jesus is asking us to love God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength, more than anything else, but we love lots of things, we spend way more time with other people and other things than we do with God. If we loved God the most, we would live our lives differently, me included.
I’ll be honest, I spent more time watching football yesterday than I did in prayer, work and prayer are different, I worked a lot yesterday and didn’t pray much until after the Iowa game, thankfully there were 25 hours in the day!
If you haven’t figured it out I’m a pretty social guy. Very often I just want to go out at night or spend time with friends, often I have to force myself to go and pray, just to spend time with Jesus in the Church, it doesn’t sound as fun as the myriad of other things I could be doing.
But the more that I do spend time in prayer, the more that I conform myself to Jesus, the more I am strengthened. “I love you, Lord, my strength.” That was our responsorial psalm, and this is why we go to prayer, because God loves us.
Furthermore, in our first reading we heard that “Moses spoke to the people, saying: "Fear the LORD, your God,”- now when the word “Fear” is used here, it isn’t like we normally think of it, like to be afraid of punishment. Rather, it is more like, to be in awe, to be amazed at what God does. If we have eyes to see we will recognize that “we are surrounded on all sides by signs of God’s presence” (Prayer from Breviary) and God is doing awesome things, so we should be in awe because He loves us.
Like any friendship, any relationship, the more time you spend with someone the more you love them and become like them. And when we spend that time with God, we grow in love and then that allows us to love our neighbors better.
There is always room for more God in our lives. So the question becomes: How can you give God more time this week? How can you love your neighbor as yourself more?
This week as we celebrated All Saints, I was thinking about the lives of the Saints. Most were not born Saints, most lived very normal lives, fighting wars (Ignatius of Loyola), selling clothes (Francis of Assissi), but they became Saints. We focus on how they were at the end of their lives, often forgetting that they weren’t always this Holy.
Well this is a reminder, we all start somewhere, we all grow from there. God wants us to all become Saints, but it starts in very simple ways, by spending time in prayer, by reading the Bible, by reading spiritual books, and then, inspired by our love of God, we go out and love our neighbor in the world, again in simple ways.
Easy stuff, not complicated, we just have to take that step, we just have to make the next right choice. You’ll never regret spending time with God or treating a neighbor with love.
As today is All Soul’s, and in this month of November we remember our beloved dead, and here at the end of the Church year we focus on “Last Things,” I just want to leave you with a quote on “death” from a modern, soon-to-be Saint, and another on growing closer to God.
In 2006, Carlo Acutis’ last words to his mother before he died from cancer at the age of 15 were, “Mom, don’t be afraid. Since Jesus became a man, death has become the passage towards life, and we don’t need to flee it. Let us prepare ourselves to experience something extraordinary in the eternal life.”
Blessed Carlo Acutis spent time preparing for eternal life in prayer, and he did the simple things well in his short life, he wore Nike’s & played video games like any teenager, but he also helped the poor in his community and taught people about Eucharistic Miracles, and even as a young man he was concerned about people growing distant from the Church and Sacraments. He is also known for saying, “The more Eucharist we receive, the more we will become like Jesus.”
May God bless us as we receive Jesus in the Eucharist today, praying that we would conform ourselves to Him, so that He can work through us.