Tuesday, September 20, 2011

According to the Command of God

How we view ourselves, how we view our lives, how we view God is always important as we navigate each day avoiding sin and temptation while trying to serve the Lord.

There are days when my life feels like a goofy sixties sex farce, a hyper-earnest free-will morality tale, a gentle feel good family picture complete with a tail wagging dog, apple pie baking grandmother, tree climbing children, and a bloody high tech espionage thriller. Reality shifts each day, my perception changes, my perspective and point of view constantly realigns itself. An eagerness directs me, moves me forward toward God each day. I try to keep busy doing little things in God’s name. I try to keep busy serving God. My ambition is to be a loving, loyal, obedient servant of the God. I seek humility, charity, obedience, compassion, mercy each day. I stretch to obtain goodness, holiness, kindness in both my thoughts and my actions. Living involves action, motion. Living involves prayer, reflection. Living involves God. This I believe. This is how I live. This is my humanity. This is my philosophy. This guides me each day. Subjects for each day’s prayers appear in my mind. I feel that God helps pilot me around certain obstacles, certain temptations when I have the courage, the virtue to listen.

Christian life involves opportunities to share. Christian life provides love to give and receive. Christian life presents messages to be proclaimed. We are all asked to evangelize, to use our lives, our talents to spread the Good News, to encourage and inspire others to believe and to serve the Lord.

Before my conversion I came to church just to feel the presence of God, just to see the presence of God in the faces of strangers.

Being Catholic allows a subtle growth in the Holy Spirit, a subtle nurturing by the Holy Spirit. My humanity is shaped by Catholic Christian teachings of social justice, fairness, the Beatitudes and the Gospels reading. I struggle with loving my neighbor on some days. I struggle with how to help those less fortunate than I am. I am nervous sometime when I am approached for money by beggars on the street. Sometimes I buy food, sometimes I simply speak in gentle tones and offer quiet silent prayers for assistance for the person, for salvation for the person.

There is a comic element to my life, to how I try to follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ. I am often a loner, sometimes visibly nervous. Religion contains nuances of solemn moments, nuances of situational humor. Being Christian remains a serious, solemn practice in an increasing flippant, irreverent, crazy world.

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