In today’s reading, we continue to hear excerpts from Paul’s
first letter to the Thessalonians. Today’s message from Paul is a call to
holiness, asking us to remain true to our Christian values, asking us to live
out the values of our faith in the way will live out the reality of our lives.
I remember Brother
Francisco at the mission site I served at in the village of Borbon in the rain
forest jungles of Ecuador. He used to
tell the youth there in our mission site that their lives at that present
moment were a fruit of how they lived out their lives in the past, how they
needed to make decisions that would bring forth the fruits of their faith in
the future. In our modern world, so many
people do what feels good and make choices based upon short-term
pleasures. Yet, today, Paul is calling
us to a life of holiness. We are not
called to make decisions because they are the politically correct thing to do, or
because we just go with the flow with what everyone else is doing in our
society. We need to remember that the
Thessalonians were not coming out of a strong Jewish background, but rather had
been idol worshippers and had followed other practices that were contrary to
the values that Jesus teaches us. The
Thessalonians also fought against so much of what was going on in the secular
world around them just as we also do.
We are all called
to lives of holiness. We are called to
follow the values of our faith with courage, integrity, and sincerity. May we feel that call to holiness that will
help us follow that straight and narrow path.
No comments:
Post a Comment