LENTEN CONVERSION: the most difficult choice you will ever make

The title of this blog is not my own, but the topic of Bishop Robert Barron’s YouTube Sunday sermon this week. I recommend that you subscribe to his YouTube channel.

I find that my Lectio Divina meditations are informed by my latest experiences, grounded, of course, in my Lectio of Philippians 2:5. Today, Bishop Barron’s insightful thoughts about Abraham and the sacrifice of Issac, his only son, to God stoked the fires of thought about my center and what is important in my life. In my book, The Place No One Wants to Look, I write of the importance of having a center, that one value, highest good, as Bishop Barron would say, above which there is no other. https://amzn.to/3r2ru9J My center is Philippians 2:5. “…have in you the mind of Christ Jesus.” It is the capstone, my highest aspiration in this life, and one which I hope to carry on into the next. I want you to read what Bishop Barron has to say about the most difficult choice any of us have to make. I found it a confirmation of what has been at the very center of my being. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-kQ2w97eN4

What is your center or highest good? Lent is a time to take stock of what is important in your spiritual life and check your priorities. If your priority is not God (Deuteronomy 6:5 and Matthew 22:36), it is time to make all thing new once again.

One of the Holy Spirit’s insights that have pricked my otherwise routine retirement is that I must search for God each day where I find him and as I find him. If I choose God as the center of my life, I have to work to keep Him centered. I call this the Rule of Revolving Centers, one due to Original Sin’s effects and why I have to pray each day for God to have mercy of me, a sinner. Contemplative practice takes work and is not for the faint of heart. With Christ, all things are possible. https://amzn.to/3syxsPH

What is your center? If it is not God, what do you place there?

uiodg