The establishment of the Early Church was not an easy, straight-forward, journey. There were a lot of disagreements and heated discussions, struggles and sufferings. Today, we hear about Paul being stoned by the people of Antioch and Iconium, even being left for dead. The people of this region feared the word of God; they were resistant to its message, to the point where they wanted to kill Paul, the messenger. But, later in our first reading, we hear that other people from that same region give words of encouragement to Paul in his efforts of evangelization. Paul and his companions persevered in the midst of many challenges and sufferings. When I was at St Thomas in Saltillo last Sunday evening for mass to celebrate our baccalaureate mass with the two young ladies who are graduating from high school from our Saltillo community, one of the members remarked to me how important the theological virtue of hope is for our young people in the midst of all we see going on in the world. In his encyclical Spe Salvi (Saved by Hope), Pope Benedict addresses the issues of the sufferings we endure in life, and the ability for us to still have hope on our journey of faith: “It is not by sidestepping or fleeing from suffering that we are healed, but rather by our capacity for accepting it, maturing through it and finding meaning through union with Christ, who suffered with infinite love.” In many ways Paul and his companions did not flee from their sufferings and their challenges, but rather united those sufferings to the sufferings that Christ endured, finding meaning in those sufferings through the lens of faith. May we have that same courage and tenacity and wisdom on our own journey of faith.
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