encourage

We must do whatever we can do to encourage ourselves to live lives filled with pure and clean love.

It is the heroic type of love, universal and unconditional. It is the love which expects and deserves only the most unreasonable responses; both kindness and goodness are truly immortal, occurring despite the intentions of the worst of mankind. It is the love from the churches, the cathedrals, the parishes. It is the universal Christian love. It is the golden desire for peace and social justice taught by Christ. There must be prayer. There must be hope. For faith to grow it must be allowed to grow freely in each person; free will must direct each of us toward God and a life of service and sacrifice.

Our lives should always direct us toward God’s glory. We must consider each day, each choice that we make as a ticket for our eternity. Our lives must always inspire others to want to do God’s work, to bear witness for the Lord, to work to have lives filled with goodness and love.

Make all sin and things which might lead us to sin in our lives diminish in importance to us with each new day; let it vanish from our lives.

Modernity allows us to interpret our lives based upon archetypes. psychological traits, and stereotypical character traits. Modernity allows us to witlessly accept sin in our lives and in our hearts. We must encourage our souls to combat this. Our souls must always remember and inspire goodness in us.

We must build lives filled with humility, charity, mercy, and forgiveness which will help us inherit God’s love. Our humanity requires love. We must always have God as the focal point of our lives, as the central point of certainty of our lives. We must always remember the consequences of both our good and bad choices. Our lives should not cause the reduction of either our hope or humanity. We must confront all uncertainty and unfulfillment with faith and love. It behooves us to minimize the importance of God in our lives; we must analyze all the material of our lives as we try to move closer to God and build lives based upon Christ’s life and teaching.

We must always project love and hope in our daily lives.

The Triumph

Our lives are filled with many moments equivocal, moments caustic. Our society creates and exaggerates spiritual and existential conflicts. Our materialist culture is a jumbled mixture of assumptions and ambitions, praising decadence and moral and ethical ambiguity while hiding moral deprivation.

How abstract life can sound when certain words are utilized to manipulate our emotional response to a topic, to temper our reactions and our interactions! How absurd modernity is when society encourages distance and distrust among its diverse members. In many ways modernity will always be at war with Christianity.

The triumph of God is love. Faith is the centrifuge of the soul’s longing for God. Within faith there is something euphoric, something symbolic.

Of course within our individual narrative lines there are always examples of God’s mercy, compassion, and love which we sometimes overlook. We must acknowledge always acknowledge and offer praise to God, our lives must involve holiness.

It is easy to forget that being Christian means being part of a community. Christianity does not grow in a vacuum. In each of us Christianity’s formation has been a continual activity of our hearts, minds, and souls. It’s impact upon our imagination is hard to calculate.

The Sacraments of the Church allows us to develop and maintain an identity as believers and followers of Jesus Christ. The characteristics of Christ’s teaching provides a model for living a simple life filled with forgiveness, mercy, and love.

Modernity offers and promotes a complicated network of relationships. Even when modernity suggests simplicity, rarely is simplicity ever achieved without rejecting and/or limiting access to some core parts of modernity.

For those who allow themselves to believe and to follow the teachings of the Christianity, life can be a more simple, more spiritual, and more beautiful. This is not meant to suggest that Christian life is easy. It is not. Being Christian is often a daily struggle between good and bad; moral and ethical choices confront us each day at work, home, and many places in between; the meagerness of consumerism constantly battles our sense of social justice.

Being Christian helps us to understand the world in which we live, understand that many of the problems and concerns have been around in one form or another for thousands of years. Being Christian gives us hope and strength to survive. Being Christian allows us to believe in God, his mercy, his forgiveness, his love. Being Christian encourages us to believe that we are not alone.

A Christian life is filled with hope and love.