Your Personal Invitation

30 Nov

“Religious life is an encounter with the living God. Sometimes that encounter is preceded by a kind of soul-searching agony that tries desperately not to hear, runs in the opposite direction, and frantically tries to reason itself out of answering the invitation.”
~ Mother Angelica

Today is the Feast of St. Andrew.  He and St. Peter, his brother, were some of the first invited by Jesus to follow Him.  That invitation had a lot of consequences.  It meant that Peter, Andrew, and the other Apostles would leave their families and friends behind.  They would leave their jobs behind.  They would leave behind, in short, everything that was predictable and comfortable.

That is something that is extremely difficult to accomplish.  Yet that is what the Lord asked of them.  That is also something the Lord asks of us as well.  Oh, we may not have to leave family and friends and jobs behind.  However, we will have to let go of a whole host of things that bring us comfort and predictability if we are to plumb the depths of our soul as God directs us.  That is not only extremely difficult, it can be very painful as well.

For, when we allow God to enter our lives, we are faced with all the things that we say and do (or leave unsaid or undone) that are not from God.  Those things, we need to root out of our lives.  If we are honest, though, we would have to admit that we do not want to let many of them go.  They have made us who we are and we often count on them.

I guess the question, on this Feast of one of the Apostles, would appropriately be: Whom do we want to count on more?  Jesus or ourselves?

If the answer is Jesus, we have some spiritual housecleaning to do.

FAITH ACTION:  Pray for the gift of discernment that you may be able to see and hear the invitation that God gives you today.