Reflection: Our culture places on each one of us the pressure to know what is best for ourselves and then make it happen. Yet we have a Father who knows us and provides, who says “you have a home, you belong”; a Father who does not leave us to muscle through life on our own, if we are willing to give Him our needs.
Share: Take some silent time to pray: “Where do I lack the courage to live today? Where am I tired of fending for myself?” Ask for the grace to know how He is offering to provide for you through His Church.
Pray: Pray the Litany of Trust. Download it here.
Blessings,
Sr. Faustina Maria Pio, SV
Reflect: Being worried and anxious about the future is a common part of human nature. We try to prepare for the unknown, and try to have some control over its outcome. Why does God want us to stop having anxiety about the future? Because God wants us to trust Him. He wants us to trust and believe the truth that He will take care of our every need. Trusting the future to His providence frees us from looking ahead, and focuses us on God’s presence here and now. God wants to bless and love us in the present moment, and always looking to the future robs us (and God) of the gift He wants to give us.
Reflect: Forgiveness can be challenging for all of us. It was for Saint Peter our first Pope, who was challenged by Jesus to forgive always at all times. Following the example of Jesus, we want to learn to forgive from the Cross as Jesus did.
Reflect: “The past can hurt, but the way I see it, we can either run from it or learn from it.” This wisdom comes from one of my favorite scenes in The Lion King when Rafiki shows Simba some tough love which ultimately leads to him taking up the dignity that rightly belongs to him as son of the king. All too often, painful experiences and memories can keep us locked and isolated in places of shame or fear. The enemy would have us believe that we are alone and there is something wrong with us. When we allow ourselves to remember who we are, and more importantly whose we are, the layers of hurt and pain can melt away and allow us to recognize the love that has known us at every moment in the past, is with us in the present and will be with us in the future. Choosing to let Jesus be born in us here and now fills our vision with his love and our hearts with confidence in the promise that he is truly Emmanuel, God with us, and that he will never leave us or forsake us.
Reflect: It’s an interesting thing how endlessly the human heart desires to know that it is loved. In His hands, in His love, I discover more and more who I am and that I’m deeply loved – beyond my dryness, beyond the stresses of every day. I begin to hear that He calls me by name with every beat of His Sacred Heart. Jesus wants to be my refuge…drawing me from the million other ways I try to satisfy this longing for love. Only in Jesus does this infinite longing in my heart find an infinite response.