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Posts Tagged ‘Perseverance’

Zooming in and out Provides Needed Perspective Shifts

Posted in Ordinary Time, Reflections from Other Writers and Speakers, Reflections on Scripture, tagged , , , , , , , on February 4, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

This week’s readings:

  1. Job 7:1–4, 6–7
  2. Psalm 147:1–2, 3–4, 5–6
  3. 1 Corinthians 9:16–19, 22–23
  4. Mark 1:29–39

What this week’s readings say to me:

The first reading reminds me I’m not alone when life feels like a burden and everything life involves feels like nothing more than an ending and unwelcome obligation. It reminds me it’s okay to share these feelings with God in an unfiltered way. It also encourages me to consider the ways the situations I find myself in might be different than the trials Job finds himself in the midst of. It reminds me to look for blessings, however insignificant they sometimes seem.

This week’s psalm is one of praise. It characterizes God as a healer of all kinds of wounds, a healer whose wisdom has no limits.

The third reading returns to the subject of obligations, specifically the obligation to preach the gospel. When I read the parts of 1 Corinthians that come before and after this reading, I’m reminded that preaching the gospel is about so much more than talk. It’s about living like Jesus so that his message will come alive for others through me. Living like Jesus means giving of myself to others, acknowledging my feelings and desires and what I’m experiencing in a given moment, without forgetting that these realities are for from permanent.

Therefore, I have the obligation to preach the gospel with my life regardless of how I feel about having that mission. If I’m eager to fulfill that mission, the fulfilling of it is its own reward. If I’m not eager, then I’ve been asked to share the gifts that God has given to me anyway. I’m also challenged when I share these gifts not to expect to receive anything from the person with whom I’m sharing. The promise of the reading, perhaps, is that the reward whenever I offer nothing beyond my obedience will be grace received from giving without expectations. Such giving promises the grace of spiritual freedom. It seems to me that this freedom paradoxically offers the ability to reach out to people from many different walks of life because a spiritually free person isn’t preoccupied with the concerns of only one individual or group. A person can get a more expansive perspective from this situation because she hasn’t zoomed in on the picture too closely.

In the fourth reading, I see Jesus living what this paradox of spiritual freedom looks like. Peter’s mother-in-law is ill, and Peter brings this situation to Jesus, who cares for His friend by making the mother-in-law well. Yet Jesus doesn’t just help His closest companions or the people in one town. We read about Him moving on to the next town. But before He does so, He makes time for rest, quiet, prayer, and reflection, showing that these activities are essential to fulfilling His mission, which is a mission you and I have been asked to share with others and with Him.

What someone else is sharing about this week’s readings:

Mary Anne Sladich-Lantz’s reflection on this week’s reading calls attention to what Jesus does when He heals Peter’s mother-in-law. I find it inspiring that she zeros in on the very human detail that she does. Read here to find out what I mean. Her reflection also includes a quotation I’ll turn into a pull quote that makes a good summary of this week’s readings, as well as a words to bring to prayer.

Discovering wholeness, healing, and joy do not save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak.  In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily, too. Perhaps we are just more alive.  Yet as we are healed and discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters.  We have hardship without becoming hard.  We have heartbreak without being broken.

From The Book of Joy:  Lasting Happiness in a Changing World, as quoted by Mary Anne Sladich-Lantz

Beyond this week’s readings:

I’m not writing this post as a person who practices what this week’s readings preach. My natural inclination right now and at almost all other times, it seems, is to crawl in a hole in the ground with a device whose battery somehow never dies and lose myself in games, music, and movies. Forever. Because silence and reality feel too heavy to bear.

Now movies, games, aren’t necessarily bad things. In fact, I believe they can be part of rest. It’s the desire to turn only to these things that’s problematic, to say the least. My experience is that these activities don’t provide rest that’s truly restorative. Maybe an activity’s ability to restore makes the difference between its ability to provide escape and its ability to provide rest. The things that are easy for me to turn to offer escape, while prayer and reflection provide rest.

Can listening to music to be a form of prayer? Absolutely. But my experience is that even music or a movie with a spiritual message sometimes offers the illusion of a preferable change in feelings or perspective, an illusion that fades once the music or the picture fades.

I guess this experience is a reminder that so much of life is fleeting, and that the only constants are God and change and that God is the source of true rest. And yet God isn’t calling me to rest all the time — even in God. The time for eternal rest comes after this life. While I still have this life, God calls me to a varying rhythm of work and rest.

Lord, help me to resist the constant desire to withdraw and to stay withdrawn. Help me to reach out to others rather than lash out at them. Amen.

Work Consulted but Not Linked to

The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.

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Sharing in God’s Vision Requires Perseverance and Humility but Reaps Eternal Rewards

Posted in Reflections on Scripture, Who Am I in God, Who is God, tagged , , , , , , on July 2, 2023| 1 Comment »

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash
This picture was one of the results when I searched Unsplash.com for “God’s-Eye View.”

This week’s readings:

  1. 2 Kings 4:8–11, 14–16a
  2. Psalm 89:2–3, 16–17, 18–19
  3. Romans 6:3–4, 8–11
  4. Matthew 10:37–42

I’d say this week’s readings are about how seeing the world through God’s eyes affects a person’s outlook and behavior. They’re also about how seeing this way reaps rewards, though often not one’s that come quickly or easily.

It seems a reward for virtue hasn’t come quickly or easily for the woman in the Old Testament reading. She’s promised a gift that she must worry she won’t receive —a son. The passage tells me “her husband is getting on in years,” and the couple doesn’t have a son yet, so there’s reason to doubt that would change as the husband ages (2 Kings 4:14). And not having a son could mean loss of financial security and social standing for the wife as she gets older, since, it seems, her husband is considerably older than she is. If he dies before she does, and she doesn’t have a son, she won’t have a home or support unless another male relative takes her in or she remarries.

The woman in the story isn’t going to be facing this situation though. Because of the hospitality she shows Elisha, he promises her that “by the same time next year, [she’ll] have a son” (2 Kings 4:16). The next verse reveals the woman’s life changes as Elisha has promised it will , but I think the fact that the reading ends before the prophecy comes true provides a lesson, which is that we can take Elisha at his word because word comes from God. The further message of the passage is that the woman receives her gift from God because she has supported God’s work in recognizing Elisha’s holiness and in offering him hospitality on account of it. In other words, good things happen to people who see the world through the eyes of God and respond to the needs that this way of seeing reveals to them.

This week’s psalm sends a similar message with the following words:

Blessed the people who know the joyful shout;
in the light of your countenance, old LORD, they walk.
At your name they rejoice all the day,
and through your justice they are exalted.

Psalm 89: 16-17

The thing is, if a person doesn’t see through God’s eyes, someone “exalted” through God’s justice may not look “raise[d] on high; elevate[d], as the New World College Dictionary defines “exalted.” After all, Jesus was exalted by God’s justice and yet he grew up in circumstances that were humble, to say the least, and he worked hard, traveling long distances on foot. Then he was subjected to an agonizing death. Furthermore, relatively few people were physical witnesses to the signifiers of his exaltation, the resurrection and the ascension. Not even Paul witnessed these events in the way that people who walked with Jesus while he was alive did. And yet Jesus allowed him to see with God’s eyes and to write:

Brothers and sisters: Are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life.

Romans 6: 3-4

I don’t know about you, but I usually don’t feel like I’m living in “newness of life” or that I’m going to, so I don’t feel like the people described in the psalm as “rejoicing all the day at [the] name” of God (Romans 6:4). I’ve heard some believers say that the times I least feel like doing this are the times I most need to do it anyway. Come to think of it, a lot of activities and mindsets feel like less of a struggle to me — writing I’m thinking of you here—when I make myself do them even when I don’t feel like it. I suppose this approach to life builds perseverance and resilience. Maybe being intentional about offering gratitude and praise would remind me that God has a broader view of life than I do. God sees which path is best. I can’t on my own, but sometimes, with God’s help, I can. Yet even in situations where the best path seems clear, I need to allow that God sees and knows things I don’t and can’t.

The reality that I’m limited in ways God is why I need God’s help to have healthy relationships. What’s best for relationships and the people in them isn’t always what’s preferred by the people involved. However, when I don’t love God first so that I can see my relationships through God’s eyes, and love the people as God loves them, I distort who the people are. I turned them Into idols. To do so is to give all of us less than we deserve, which is to be seen and treated like the unique reflection of God that each of us is.

Lord, help me to see the world around me as You see it so that I can recognize what reflects You in myself and others and nurture it. Plans whatever is in me and others that doesn’t reflect You, and help me to trust that surrendering to Your vision and Your cleansing will result in an exultation that surpasses anything this world can offer or imagine. Amen.

Work cited

Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc. “Sunday July, 2 2023: Readings at Mass.” The New American Bible, 2001. Universalis for Windows, Version 2.179, Universalis Publishing Ltd., 26 Feb. 2023, https://universalis.com/n-app-windows.htm

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