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Momma always said, “Son, you don’t like something? Well, offer it up!”
Today, Fr. Mike explores the traditional understanding of offering up your pain, embracing your suffering, and making sacrifices in the spiritual life.
https://www.youtube.com/@AscensionPresents
The Call to Christian Discipleship
Our love and suffering as Christian disciples, like the Lord’s on the cross, does not happen in vain. As the Franciscan scholar Zachary Hayes stated so clearly, “We become like what we love,” and that transformation recasts the categories of our ordinary experience into something else, something greater, something more than what we had originally expected. This is not to deny the real pain, loss, and trauma that can accompany suffering, but it does suggest that the meaning of human experience is deeper and more significant than we think.
Like Francis of Assisi, we too can be transformed by the power of love and embrace the call to Christian discipleship with passion. The task at hand is to see that the Word continues to call us to move beyond ourselves, to enter into an evermore intimate relationship with God, to make God’s story our story, to work for justice and peace in our world, and to embrace the love and suffering that comes with following Christ.
—from the book The Last Words of Jesus: A Meditation on Love and Suffering
by Daniel P. Horan, OFM
Franciscan Media: https://www.franciscanmedia.org/
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By taking up our cross and following Christ, we gain a new way of seeing sickness and frailty. Along with this newness of vision, the Church is given the command from her founder to heal the sick. Since its beginning, the Church has anointed the sick among us, praying for their healing and salvation. Amid their sufferings, the suffering can endure, uniting themselves to Christ’s own afflictions for the sake of the Church. Today’s readings are Catechism paragraphs 1506-1513.
Click on link to play video: https://youtu.be/U94oBQ8ZHj4
Sickness and suffering bring us face-to-face with our fragility and limitations. While they might cause some to lose hope and become bitter, we can also endure them in such a way as to grow in maturity and trust in God. Jesus not only heals the sick in the Gospels but also plunges into suffering’s depths. In this redemptive work, we know Jesus as the physician of soul and body. Today’s readings are Catechism paragraphs 1499-1505.
Click on link to play video: https://youtu.be/v71IcAYTCaM
Sometimes they’re things we don’t want to do… but we have to do them anyway. Sometimes you make it through saying, “I’ll learn to like it.” But what about if you never do?
Today, Fr. Mike gives us a word of encouragement to find joy even in the midst of suffering and to avoid falling into despair or resentment as we walk toward eternity.