Challenge Yourself!
Brothers and Sisters,
This Sunday we arrive at our fifth station in this Lenten journey; the station in which we reflect on the Gospel of the healing of the paralytic. The friends of the paralytic when faced with all the chaos that surrounded the home at Capernaum were truly challenged to find a way to get into the house to see Jesus. However they used their brains and the masculinity and did what they did to see the Lord. Their strength didn’t come from their brains nor did it come from their masculinity! Their strength came from their great faith. They believed without a doubt that Jesus could heal their friend if he chose to. And yes Jesus did choose!
In our own lives today there is so much chaos, so much noise. We are challenged to do well at work, to own the best house, car and clothing, to eat the finest food, go on a holiday every year and so on. These are all wonderful things but in our effort to achieve all this, many times they allow us to use the excuse that we are time challenged or time poor. We allow the daily routine of our lives from trying to find a way to reach Jesus because we are so busy and because simply we just can’t find the time.
Even in our parish life, we sometimes get too consumed in the work that we are doing that we forget the main reason that we are carrying out this work. We allow the noise and chaos surrounding us to stop us from seeing Jesus. This noise and chaos can come from the gossip that we make up, spread and listen to. It comes from peoples dissatisfaction with anything and everything that we do and it sometimes stems from this sense of competition that we have to out do one another. We get so caught up in these things that we forget that Jesus even exists.
Unlike the paralytic and his friends, we have easy access to Jesus. We don’t need to climb through roofs to find him. In fact, we really don’t need to challenge ourselves too much to see him. He is available to us all day, every day in the tabernacle. He is available to us during the celebration of the Divine Liturgy. He is available to us during Adoration, confession and daily prayer. What we do need to challenge though is our will and our faith. We need to ask ourselves, is our faith strong enough so that we can find the time to come and see him, overcoming the hindrances that allow us to stumble and create excuses that deprive us from the reason that we are here.
