At His Feet

When she looked up, she saw her son's feet with a huge nail driven through them. If Mary, the Mother of Christ had to suffer the agony of watching her son tortured and crucified, we must realize that we are not going to get off "scot free" from suffering and death. He suffered and died not so that we wouldn't have to, but so that we could endure our suffering and death. Joined to Christ by our suffering is our greatest testimony to love- that we lay our lives down for another.

Sacrifice isn't a word heard it today without being spoken in a derogatory manner, most often. We're American's after all right? I mean, it's 2006! We've got fast food, microwaves, fast cars, jets, e-mail, internet, etc. Everything is at our fingertips that we could possibly need, use or want, to make our lives easier than in earlier generations. All well and good, except when it flows into our Christianity, that's when the red flags are waving, and hopefully, we notice and heed their warning. If we ignore them, and we start believing in an "easy, cheap grace" we're in a very precarious place! Therein lies the potential danger of thinking our faith is supposed to make everything easy, and we're to live free without pain. God forbid!

We must go to the foot of the cross. We have to walk the road to Calvary as did our Lord. We look up and see His holy, bloody feet and having carried our cross there, with our shame, pain, guilt, sin, joy we lay it all down. We take our ALL to him and lay ourselves at his feet in sacrifice so that we can then go out to our world and lay our lives down for our friends and our enemies.

Please read the lives of the Saints and learn of them through their stories. See what their faith in Christ and the Eucharist cost them, and ask their intercession for your own journey toward Heaven, so that you and I can live this life and endure all things in and for His Name and for the redemtption of souls. When we join our prayers and our lives with the Communion of Saints, we have power to overcome temptations, and sin, and self-pity and self-love...the root of sin...pride. Remember, the proud God will reject, not because God is a mean tyrant, but because He is LOVE. However, a contrite spirit and broken heart, in a repentant, humble soul, God will embrace and listen to, and hold in the palm of his Hand as a Father. For He is our Father, our Abba, our Daddy. No fear can overcome us when we remain in His Grace. The remaining in grace is our part, but with trust, and confidence in Jesus and Our Mother, Mary, we can be assured of His part...the promise of eternal life, with Him in the Glory of God the Father, where tears and pain are no more.

I'll post some favorite books soon that have helped me aspire to holiness, in thought word and deed. NOT that I've gained much progress as yet, but asking my big brothers and sisters in Heaven to pray for me, gives me assurance beyond anything I've ever known in my former evangelical days. Saints aren't just "parts of names of churches" as I used to read driving by them: St. Luke's Methodist church. St. Mark's Lutheran church. I simply didn't equate them with the Saints of the bible, or if I did, they were so far back in history they weren't relevant to me at all. Yet those saints and thousands upon thousands of others are real, flesh and blood people who lived entirely for Christ. Some dying many torturous deaths as we know, or the many who suffered physically of TB or other diseases and ailments without cures in science or medicine available. We've come to take our health and medical science for granted, sadly. However, we shouldn't make our health and medical advancements idols, either. Balance in all things, as Saint Benedict encouraged in his rule, is key.

I know how it pleases God, to call on his friends and they encourage me to persevere knowing they made it. I pray to imitate their example every day of my life, to seek purity and holiness and things above rather than fleeting pleasures and trite trinkets here below where rust and moth and the forces of nature turn them to rust and to dust. He died to give us life to the full, and nowhere is it written that life to the full is a life without pain.