Today's Gospel

Pray During the Gaps

What jumps out at you today? Is there a word? Is there a phrase? Is there an idea?

First, we see a beautiful prayer in today's scripture. The disciples that Jesus tells the parable, and then the disciples come to Him and say, "Lord, increase our faith." It's a beautiful prayer. We've spoken before about the idea that anything that someone says to Jesus is a prayer. It's talking to God. And the disciples have this beautiful prayer today. It's like, "Lord, increase our faith." I used to pray this over and over. In the virtues of faith, hope, and charity, my spiritual mentor, he taught me to pray over and over, "Lord, increase my faith, Lord, increase my faith," all throughout the day. Because there's these little gaps in our day. We're walking from one meeting to another or we're sitting at a stoplight or we're waiting in the doctor's office, standing in line at the grocery store. And he taught me just to say these prayers, "Lord increased my faith, Lord increased my hope, Lord increased my charity," just over and over and over and over and over, a thousand times a day.

And it was a very powerful, powerful experience for me as a young man, especially, because I was probably 15 years old, 16 years old at the time when I started doing that. And of course, we know that God answers our prayers. And so we ask God to increase our faith, what's He going to do? Say, "No"? No. Not a million years. We asked God to give us hope. What's He going to say? "No, you got enough hope"? Or, "No, I want you to be a bit hopeless"? No. He's going to increase our hope. And so that's a beautiful prayer and ties back to a time in my life when I was first being schooled, when I was first being coached, discipled in the faith. The parable that Jesus talks about today is about temptation and causing other people to fall into temptation. And Jesus feels pretty strong about that. If you visualize what Jesus is suggesting, which is that a rope be hung around your neck and then you get cast into the sea—visualize that for a minute. That's not, I don't think, something we want happening to us anytime soon.

But we do do what Jesus is saying. We do cause others to go into temptation. I was talking to some people yesterday about the Forgotten Way, and they were asking me some questions about this section on gossip. And we were talking about that. We had a great conversation. And I think it's one of the areas where it's so easy for us to lead other people into temptation. It's so easy for us to lead other people into sin is just by gossiping about people. And by stabbing their personalities, by sometimes assassinating their character and their personality. And so I think it's easy for us to read this, "And Jesus says, 'Temptations to sin are sure to come, but woe to him by whom they come by.'" I think we read that and we think, "Well, that's somebody else." Maybe not consciously, but subconsciously, we float through that. And that's why this time at the gospel is so important because it encourages us, but it also challenges us to say, "Hold on a minute. You've done that. You've probably done that fairly recently." You might want to rethink that. You might want to look for new ways to handle those situations in your life because that isn't going to be the last time that gossip comes up in your circle of friends or even with people you just met. The faith is beautiful. It's genius in Catholicism. Have a great day and remember, Be Bold, Be Catholic