A Message From a Member of Our Pastoral Staff
I don’t know if it’s my age … but it seems that time is flying by! We are just a few weeks away from the Christmas season and in less than a month, we will be celebrating Ash Wednesday. This year it falls on Valentine’s Day… a day of fasting and abstention. Of course, Ash Wednesday is the start of the forty days of Lent and this leads us up to Holy Week and to the glorious feast of Christ’s resurrection, Easter Sunday.
Right now, however, we are in the few weeks of ordinary time. A little bit of a breather between the two major feasts of Christmas and Easter. In today’s Gospel, we hear Christ calling a few of the apostles to come and follow Me. He calls them to leave their fishing nets and to become fishers of Men. My sisters and brothers, we are all called to be Disciples of Christ. When we are baptized, we are automatically called to be Disciples of Christ …To leave “our nets” behind and to be fishers of men.
Sometimes we tend to forget that not only priests, religious, and Deacons receive the call from Jesus to follow Him. We are all called. Each one’s answer to that call is obviously different. Twenty-five years ago, I answered God’s call to the Diaconate and will be ordained twenty years this June. Sometimes we aren’t tuned in to when God is calling us. There’s a little story of a man whose house was going to be flooded. The rescuers came in a rowboat to rescue him. He refused to get in saying God will save him. The water rose higher to the top floor. Again the rescuers came with a boat. Again, he refused saying God will save Him. Finally, they came by helicopter when he was on his roof. Again, he refused… giving the same answer. He perished in the flood. When he got to heaven, he asked God “Why didn’t you save me? God answered, “I sent you two boats and a helicopter and you didn’t listen!”
Lent is a perfect time to spend some time asking God what are you calling me in my life right now. Remember that the call could be a whisper of a feeling. For me, Lent is a time for me to sit down with the Lord and see if there is somewhere different that the Lord is calling me. It does not matter at what stage in life you are, we must listen to the possibility that God may be calling us to something new and exciting in our lives. As we get closer to Lent think about what you may do… I say do rather than give up something. I feel doing this is putting Lent in a positive rather than a negative spiritual journey. More time in prayer with the Lord is a great way to enhance your Lenten journey. Perhaps it’s time to join a Lenten small faith group. Whatever you do make this Lent the best you can and you will feel the joy of Christ’s resurrection on Easter more fully.
Peace of Christ,
Deacon Russ