Choose to be little

WORD 2day: Saturday, 19th week in Ordinary time

August 19, 2023: Joshua 24: 13-15; Matthew 19:13-15

To choose God, to choose God as the absolute, to choose God above all - these would mean...  choosing to be little! What do we mean? 

Choosing to be little means choosing to be laughed at, choosing to be jeered at, choosing to be labelled 'conservative' or 'irrelevant'. This is becoming more and more real as days go by! The culture in general is growing increasingly cynical towards anything spiritual. 

In fact, the cultures which were once so dominated by the God-talk, are today turning, if they have not already totally turned, "Godless". However, it is not our task to be sitting in judgement on the people around. Our task here is to take into account our personal daily life, our personal choices and priorities, and the elements of our daily life that truly matter to us. There we will have a clue - do we want to be accepted by the world and found relevant to the times or do we want to choose to be little, to be that little flock that surrounds the Lord, like children who feel secure in the embrace of a mother? 

What would our choice be? If I say 'I choose to be little', I choose to stick on to the Lord in spite of the attractions of the dominant images of the world today, I choose to hold on to the values that are Reign-related and not what is trending, I choose to be called an "outdated boomer" while the rest pose themselves as a progressive and advanced generation of humanity. We cannot but be inspired by the dedication which we find in Joshua's declaration today: "it is the Lord our God we choose to serve; it is God's voice that we will obey!" 

Enjoying the fruits that we never planted

WORD 2day: Friday, 19th week in Ordinary time

August 18, 2023: Joshua 24: 1-13; Matthew 19: 3-12

When a brother of the Islamic faith speaks in public, or even in a simple familiar gathering, invariably he begins with terms like, 'Insha Allah' or 'Masha Allah'... Certainly we have seen this atleast on the media screens. These terms simply mean 'if God wills' and 'God has willed' respectively. As much as we admire them for this courageous reference to God in relationship to their daily life, we need to wonder at our own Christian brothers and sisters, our own children and ourselves! How much of this sense of God do we possess and propose to the world? 

It does so much good to realise that everything in my life comes from the Lord - in the name of the Lord, and for the will of God. "What do we have, that we have not received?" challenges St. Paul (cf. 1 Cor 4:7). If all that we are and all that we have, is received from God, why not acknowledge that at every event of our lives - not just at failures and difficulties where we readily point to God, but all at sucessess and peaceful moments when we prefer to live on our own.

Dedicating oneself for God, for God's will, for God's task is a matter of choice, not merely on our part, but on the part of the One who is at the root of everything. Every good that we are blessed to carry out is a gift from God - according to God's will and towards fulfilling God's will. At times we make choices that serve our own ego and our own personal plans. But what matters is to realise that we are eating the fruits of plants planted once upon a time and be one such - planters of the tree of blessing. 

The call is to realise that we are being blessed constantly by the Lord and to understand clearly what our own blessings lead us to. Challenging moments, let us get ready to brave them. Pleasant moments, let us be mindful of the fact that we are enjoying the fruits of the plants we never planted!