Could be you

Which one are you?

There’s a phrase that some of the kids use today… “Father, you woke up today and chose violence!” Its funny because if you do something that is provocative or chaotic… and it makes me sound like a cat, just being snarky for seemingly no reason. It comes from memes and a meme just starts with one catchphrase from a movie or something.

And sometimes we do wake up on the wrong side of the bed. Sometimes we get hit by one thing and then another. I think in a day, things can happen, things can get out of control, you could be caught off guard by something or maybe a person says something that set you off or rubbed you weird. So, you could wake up weird and “choose violence” or your could be having quite a lovely day and someone could just breath down your neck. A day might be weird and has many instances of interactions and reactions…but a lifetime shows the result of the frequency in which you were able to move in a direction over time. And we are all dealt a different hand by God, our job isn’t to win “the game,” our job is to play the circumstances of our lives whilst pursuing heaven and the life with God.

Fulton Sheen said: “What’s your philosophy of life? Whether you’re the king or the pawn, what matters is not what part you play, but how you play it.”

So, your role, and we can’ go back, we can only now make decisions going forward:

Are you the person who started out virtuous and then turned tired of doing good and chose the bad? Could be…

Are you the person who started off bad but then got your life together and chose peace and good? Could be…

Or are you the person who started out good and then got bad and then got your life together and then have been up and down on the good and bad roller coaster? Probably.

So how will you end? God help us choose wisely and please today and especially tommorow and on our last day, save us Jesus!

I saw a conversation this week between an online personality named Pearl (an anti-feminist) and Jason Evert, a Catholic chastity speaker. It was fascinating watching a secular and doomsday approach to marriage and society and a hopeful Catholic man responding to the current state of affairs. Pearl said, “Someone who is a prostitute and has a conversion to Christianity shouldn’t be given a pedestal and even more attention. They should learn humility for 10-20 years before they are given a microphone.” “What about a man who had a pornography addiction?” “Same rules, don’t lecture me if you haven’t gotten your life together until yesterday.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhSSsBgim50&t=2061s)

Its a pretty pessimistic stance and at the end of the day, who of us is worthy and free from sin to be able to lecture on right and wrong? God help us, help us to love the good, say the good, and do the good.

And yet its true that we have to be careful with who we bring into the spotlight and who we look up to. What’s the rule? Don’t meet your heroes! Why is this a true phrase? Because in the spotlight people behave according to a different standard than when its not being recorded. Its a sad state of affairs we have but who can live up to our expectations of the image of the perfect person that we often build up our idols to be, and once they have our affection, its hard to let go of until heartbreak.

Our goal is to be a humble person that one day God will put into the spotlight, or maybe not, and perhaps the world will judge us based off of that one interaction…how will you represent yourself, your family, your God? Someone asked me, would you like to be on EWTN?!?! Not really! Wanna go on a podcast? Not terribly, no.

And I’ve met a few celebrities that didn’t disappoint, I met Shawn Green as a kid, I met Ken Griffey Jr. with my friend Mike Sweeney, he was cool, I met Philip Rivers, he was intense and tall, I met Jim Caviezel. So there are good people out there. So maybe the phrase could be, Don’t meet your heroes, but your heroes should be saints anyways.

Taking the form of a slave.

And for these readings, because we don’t know our end and we don’t know how our heroes’ ends are going to come about, we have the example and hope of Christ to always look up to.

Humility humility humility

And who of us passes the humility test? If you raise your hand you’re proud!

unity and humility

New American Bible: Revised Edition Chapter 2

complete my joy by being of the same mind, with the same love, united in heart, thinking one thing.

who have you ever enjoyed that level of unity with? This is heaven by the way.

Some people tell me they don’t like the Church’s stance on marriage, that its “death do us part.” Isn’t it amazing that these people want marriage to go on and on and on… does your spouse feel that way? I can understand having an unspecified greater amount of time together, but beyond death? The Church didn’t even come up with this on her own, Christ said it. But which spouse would even say that in my marriage we are of one mind, the same mind, (we vote the same) and we have the same love (Christ), we beat with one heart, and we think one thing together. Are we that united?

And then, to get there, to achieve that, we have to go down. We have to humble ourselves to put on the mind of Christ.

And we don’t obey our parents or like what our priest says (or whatever moral authority figure) because of pride (I know better, or I have better things to do than what I’m being ordered to do.)

New American Bible: Revised Edition Chapter 2

Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus,

More the same mind in Christ Jesus. Don’t you want the mind of Christ. My mind is all over the place, but having Christ’s mind would be pretty amazing.

And so, get excited for heaven. There’s too much fear of what heaven is. Somehow we think this life is as good as it gets. We think we’ll be bored because its just perfect up there. Maybe we’ll have to mix it up and cause a stir because we get bored with nothing to do. But that’s our earthly brain. If we were somehow able to put on the mind of Christ, what would we actually be capable of doing and desiring. There’s plenty to do in this life. Do it with the mind of Christ, which is capable of not just turning you into someone who behaves correctly, but someone who actually likes what is good and despises the bad. If you became seriously good, well then maybe we’d all just kinda like to know ya!