"He continued to pray just as he had always done."
Daniel 6:10
Begin
Silence, Stillness, and Centering before God (2 minutes)
Scripture Reading: 1 John 4:71-2
Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has
been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because
God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into
the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he l
loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God
so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love
one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has
been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because
God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into
the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he l
loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God
so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love
one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
Devotional
God
has a different path for each of us. My closing prayer for you is that you would
be faithful to your own path. It is a tragedy to live someone else’s
life. I know; I did it
for years.
I
would like to end our time together with a story about Carlo Carletto. He lived
among Muslims in North Africa for ten years with the Little Brothers of
Jesus community.
He wrote about how, one day, he was traveling by camel in the Sahara
desert and came
upon about fifty men laboring in the hot sun, trying to repair a road.
When Carlo offered
them water, to his surprise, he saw his friend Paul, another member of
his
Christian community.
Paul
had been an engineer in Paris––working on the atomic bomb for France. God
had called him to leave everything and become a Little Brother in North
Africa. At one point, Paul’s mother came to Carlo and asked for help
understanding her son’s life.
“I
have made him an engineer,” she said. “Why can’t he work as an
intellectual in
the
church? Wouldn’t that be more
useful?”
Paul
was content to pray and to disappear for Christ in the Sahara desert. Carlo then
went on to ask himself: “What is my place in the great evangelizing
work of the Church?” He answered
his own question as follows:
I
understood that my place, too, was there, amid the ragged poor, mixing n
the mob.
Others
in the church would have the task of evangelizing, building,
feeding, preaching. The Lord asked me to be a poor man among the poor, a
worker
among workers. . . .
It’s
so difficult to judge!.
. . .
But
to one truth we must always cling desperately––to
love!
It’s
love which justifies our actions; love must initiate all we do. Love is
the fulfillment of the
law.
If,
out of love, Brother Paul has chosen to die on a desert track, by this he
is justified.
If,
out of love, [others] built schools and hospitals, by this they were
justified.
If,
out of love, Thomas Aquinas spent his life among books, by this he
was justified. . . .
I
can only say, “Live love, let love invade you. It will never fail to teach you
what you must do.”87
Questions to Consider
do"?
Prayer
Lord, I can see that there are a lot of things in me that need to change. Let your love
invade me. Give me the courage to faithfully follow your unique path for my life––
regardless of where it might lead, and regardless of the changes you want to make in me.
In Jesus’ name, amen.
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