"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.”
When push comes to shove, the Gospel is both simple and very difficult. More important, when we learn to love God with our whole heart, soul and mind, and our neighbor as ourselves, we lay the groundwork for discerning carefully how best to negotiate all the issues, questions and quandaries that come before us. The simple act of submitting to God and loving our neighbor frees us to listen without fear to whatever God asks.
At the same time, because our faith is often weak, we are not always ready to use Jesus' help, and we avoid asking for direction in dozens of ways. So desirous of being in control of our own lives, we keep working to figure everything out rather than to let go and ask the Lord for direction. At times, we tell ourselves that our fears and doubts are too small for God who must be about many other more pressing issues in the world. In other circumstances, we tell ourselves that we are not really struggling with a spiritual issue, but a psychological one and we should not bother with God with our weakness. In fact, all our excuses are empty ways of trying to direct our own lives. Only upon letting go of these desperate attempts to be God will we be free to be God's children.
Today, ask for the grace to let God be God in order to live the Gospel more simply.
Why do you think people cling so desperately to the controls they think they have over their lives?
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