Tag: beginnings

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Minute Meditation – Beginnings and Endings

It can be difficult to tell the difference between beginnings and endings. Perhaps one of the strongest lessons in Jesus’s words from the cross is that we must not be as concerned about our time as we are about God’s time. In God’s time beginnings and endings are one in the same, because God’s time is not so much a matter of minutes, hours, and days as it is about a way of living in the world. The way we mark the passage of our life is not the same way that God marks our time. It is when washing the feet of others, the giving of ourselves for the sake of our brothers and sisters, that we live according to God’s time.

—from the book The Last Words of Jesus: A Meditation on Love and Suffering 
by Daniel P. Horan, OFM, page 79

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – Beginnings and Endings

It can be difficult to tell the difference between beginnings and endings. Perhaps one of the strongest lessons in Jesus’s words from the cross is that we must not be as concerned about our time as we are about God’s time. In God’s time beginnings and endings are one in the same, because God’s time is not so much a matter of minutes, hours, and days as it is about a way of living in the world. The way we mark the passage of our life is not the same way that God marks our time. It is when washing the feet of others, the giving of ourselves for the sake of our brothers and sisters, that we live according to God’s time.

—from the book The Last Words of Jesus: A Meditation on Love and Suffering 
by Daniel P. Horan, OFM, page 79

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditations – New Beginnings

Clare recalled these new beginnings in later years. That she and her sisters had survived the painful trials of the foundation was not nearly as surprising to her as it was to Francis. “When the blessed Francis saw, however, that although we were physically weak and frail, we did not shirk deprivation, poverty, hard work, trial or the shame or contempt of the world—rather we considered them as great delights, as he had frequently examined us according to the example of the saints and his brothers—he greatly rejoiced in the Lord” (Testament, 27-29). Taking each word of this recollection on its merits, we must imagine that the early years of life in San Damiano were a continual struggle at levels material, social, and spiritual.

— from the book Light of Assisi: The Story of Saint Clare

by Margaret Carney, OSF

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – From the Very Beginning, God Is

What I love is that Psalm 139 takes us all the way back to when we first became. It reveres the beauty of our very beginnings and returns us to the miracle of our mothers. Even being carried within a womb, as each and every one of us was, God met us there. How many times have we heard, “You’re born alone and you die alone”? Psalm 139 dispels this, assuring us that even before our birth, when we were being woven, kneaded, and knitted, we had a holy spirit paralleling us. Could there be anything more comforting than this belief, that we had this connection to God way back, starting within the cocoon of our own creation?

—from the book What Was Lost: Seeking Refuge in the Psalms

by Maureen O’Brien

//Franciscan Media//