Two Lives; Two Deaths

        Today is the memorial of St. Martha.  In the Gospel reading of John, Jesus told Martha, "I am the resurrection and the life: whoever believes in me, though he should die, will come to life; and whoever is alive and believes in me will never die."

        It's clear that there are two lives: the earthly life and the eternal life.  If one can never die after this life, then a second death is implied ~ that is the loss of eternal life.  Let's make sure that after we die, we'll have eternal life with the Lord and not eternal separation from him.  The first life and death are relatively unimportant, while the second life and death are of infinite importance. 

        The best way to take care of this matter is to love the Lord with all your heart, strength, and soul in this life.

Starve Your Ego

        One way to build up humility: After you have done a good deed, don't tell anyone about it.  Not only that, don't even think about it.  Know that every time you go through what you've done in you mind, you feed your ego.  And you want to starve your ego instead.

The Free Soul

        I didn't know what to blog today until after morning Mass. During prayer, the understanding of the free soul emerged in my mind.

        Most of us who are not quite free yet, get unhappy because we don't get our way or things just don't turn out the way we'd expected or wanted. A free soul no longer seeks her or his own will. S/he leaves everything up to God, seeking his will alone. Even in seeking God's will, s/he does not move until God shows the way. (You might say that waiting is the name of the game.) Since it's no longer our ways that matter, the heart is now free and untroubled. Pretty simple stuff really.

Reasons to Rejoice

        I rejoice today because I had been called by the Father.  Knowing Jesus has given me meaning to life.  I know why I am here and where I am going.  I have the Lord's example to follow and everything is on track.  There's nothing else in this world I need for fulfillment.  Only seeing Jesus in heaven will fulfill my longing for him.  Psalm 23 comes to my mind.  The soul is ready to fly to him the moment he calls.  It's my foremost daily prayer that all will be called to enter the fold of the Father.

       

No Losers

        I used to be a worse sinner.  Read St. Augustine's story and you see how he completely turned around.  If you are familiar with Fr. Corapi, he surely was a lost soul before the Lord got him.  Jesus truly loves sinners. 

        This leads me to think of the people who are unattractive, unkempt, annoying, or even obnoxious, the kind that normally turns others off.  The lesson to me is to never look down on any of them because they may one day be transformed by the Lord into saintly creatures. 

A Guideline on Not Sinning Badly

        If we sin and no one except the Lord knows about it, that's one thing.  But if our sinning is known to others and causes them to fall away from their faith, then it becomes a lot more serious.  We should never do anything that would drive others away from Christ and/or his Church.  Instead, we should always be like a shining beacon, drawing others to Christ.  (Remember that there are people who do not always think clearly.  If you don't behave as a Catholic, they put the blame on Christ and/or the whole Church.) 

True Body and Blood

        I happened to come across 1 Corinthians 10, 16 again.  As you know, many non-Catholic denominations believe that the bread and wine (or grape juice in their case) as offered by the Lord are only symbolic of his body and blood.  If it's true, tell me if Paul would have written the above-mentioned verse the way it is?

        The verse: "Is not the cup of blessing we bless a sharing in the blood of Christ?  And is not the bread we break a sharing in the body of Christ?" 

Thoughts on Praying

        Today's reading from Luke 11 at Mass contains the familiar "Ask and you shall receive; seek and you shall find; knock and it shall be opened to you."  Elsewhere, the Lord advised praying with persistence.  Obviously, God doesn't mind our twisting his arm a bit if we feel the need to do so.

        When Jesus was going through his agony before his crucifixion, he prayed if the cup could pass him by, yet at the end he said "Your will be done."  I think this is the model we should follow.  It is consistent with what Jesus teaches in the Our Father he gave us.  

        By the way, the saints, after having totally abandoned themselves to God, merely ask God to do whatever he wishes with them.  This is prayer at the highest level.     

Improving Humility

        Today someone praised me for something, and the Lord showed me that every time someone praises you, it is the perfect occasion to ask him to take your ego down a notch by giving you another dose of humility.  Hence, being praised turns into a blessing.  My afterthought was that if I start putting this advice into practice, a lot of praises may come my way.

A Faith Question

        Jesus said that if we have faith the size of a mustard seed, we can make a mountain move.  I am trying to understand that faith and how we can possess it.  If I see a bald person and ask him to let me pray for him and believe that he is going to start growing hair again ~ is this the right kind of faith?  I don't think so.  This seems to me more like a blind, presumptuous faith not directed by the Holy Spirit, unless God has already given me the gift of healing.  

        When we pray to God to heal someone who's sick, in the back of our mind we often wonder if the healing is going to happen.  But one time many years ago, when my own son was attacked by a virus causing his heart to almost stop beating and the doctors to consider a heart-transplant operation should he survive, I walked to his bedside in ICU, made the sign of the cross on his forehead pronouncing "Be healed in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit" without hesitation, and he was discharged from the hospital four days later.  I said my prayer as if it was a command and afterward, did not even think about how God was going to answer me.  Looking  back, I do feel that my prayer was prompted by the Holy Spirit as it came out boldly and resolutely.  By the way, my son recovered completely in time.

        I remember when Peter was learning to walk on water, he started to sink the moment he took his eyes off Jesus, and the Lord chided him for having little faith.  So it seems that focusing our eyes on the Lord is a required condition.

        Last, we must acknowledge that we cannot create faith by forcing ourselves to believe, as faith is basically a gift from God.

        To obtain the kind of faith Jesus would like us to have, let's try to summarize.  We must (1) pray for the gift of faith, (2) be lead by the Holy Spirit to exercise this faith, and (3) focus on the Lord always to maintain this faith.  (One more thought: when we are at it, we might as well ask for faith the size of a water melon.)