Today's Gospel

Find the Way of Peace

It's a beautiful reading. Is there a word or a phrase, or an idea that jumps out at you? For me, there were three today, the first one is the idea that God has this tender mercy. The tender mercy of our God, I think sometimes when we think about God, we talk about God. It can be as a distant being. It can be as an anonymous being, but tenderness is an intimacy. You can't be tender from afar. And so this idea that God's mercy is tender is an intimacy. And then the second one was to give light to those who sit in darkness. We live in an age where there is a lot of darkness, and there's a lot of dark content out there. I hear people reading this stuff or watching this stuff, and I think about, okay, is that bringing light to our lives? Is that bringing darkness to our lives? And so, yeah, okay, there's this age where people were sitting in darkness, but that age is still today. And how are we bringing light, or how are we bringing darkness into the world, which means how are we bringing light, or how are we bringing darkness into people's lives, the individual people that we encounter on any given day. And then the third phrase for me was the last half a verse, to guide our feet into the way of peace. So first, it's not to guide our feet in the way of peace, but it's to guide our feet into the way of peace, which means we're not on the way of peace. We have to be guided into the way of peace. And I think that that can be very often true in our lives. And we feel restlessness, we feel anxiety, we feel overwhelmed. We have these experiences that are the opposite of peace, but we don't necessarily experience those things and say, "Oh, okay, how do I get back to the path of peace?" Very often, we just recycle through and wake up the next morning and have a different sort of overwhelmed and a different sort of restlessness and a different anxiousness, and a different sort of exhaustion. And we know all of that is not what we want. We know all of that is not the way of peace, but we don't necessarily respond to that by saying, "Okay, how do I get to the path of peace from this restlessness, from this anxiety, from this exhaustion, from this feeling of being overwhelmed?" And so as we go about our day-to-day, I encourage you to think about, okay, be mindful of, okay, when are you experiencing these things, anxiety, restlessness, exhaustion, overwhelmedness? When are you experiencing these things? How do they make you feel? What is the pattern of those things in your life? And how can you break that pattern? And to ask God, show me. This is a pattern. I don't like the pattern. The pattern isn't good for me. Help me to break the pattern. Have a great day, and remember, Be Bold, Be Catholic.