Daily Gospel Reflection

A Secret Conversation

Welcome back to Radical & Relevant. Each day we're encountering the daily gospel, looking for a word, a phrase, or an idea to anchor our day, our activities in the gospel. Today is the most famous gospel verse in sports. It's from chapter 3 of John's Gospel, verses 16 through 21. And this opening line, we always see these signs at sports games. John 3:16, this is the line. "For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life." For God sent the Son into the world not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. He who believes in Him is not condemned. He who does not believe is condemned already because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment that the light has come into the world, and men love darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does what is true comes to the light, that it may be clearly seen that his deeds have been wrought in God. What jumps out at you today? What jumps out at me is men love the darkness.

And in the reading it's said in the past tense, but I think it's true in the present tense is that we do love the darkness sometimes and we have our own very specific personal types of darkness and we love our own very specific personal types of darkness and we cling to our own very specific personal types of darkness. And today's reading is an invitation to explore our love of the darkness. What are the self-destructive behaviors that we love, that we don't want to let go of, that we hold back from God, that we say to God, "Okay, God, you can have everything except this right here. I'm keeping this for myself." And we do it. And it sounds ridiculous when we say it. And it is ridiculous when we step back and think about it. But we do it. We all do it. And there may be very powerful spiritual times in our lives when we come to God and we say, "God, I'm 100% yours. I will do anything you want, wherever you want me to do it, whenever, just give me my marching orders." There are times in our lives and in our spiritual journey where we make ourselves 100% available to God. But then we tend to take it back and we take it back like a percent at a time, or half a percent at a time or a quarter of a percent here and half a percent there and two percent here. And before you know it, we're 65% available to God. And so think today, what is the darkness that we love? How we would be called to ongoing conversion, daily conversion? And have a great day. Remember, don't just be yourself, be the very best version of yourself, all that God created you to be.