Life is a Gift Given

We are called to remain in God’s love. It is only by remaining in God’s love, in the Holy Spirit, that our joy might be complete. Life in the Spirit is what will bring our joy to completion. When we live in the Spirit and in the love of God, we can not but be moved to do all that we can to make God’s love known to others – even at the expense of sacrifice. When we come to realize that our lives are gifts, we will be more willing to give of it and ultimately give it up. Gifts are meant to be given. Our lives are gifts, and so our lives too are meant to be given up, in service of the Gospel and of our brothers and sisters. If you want to experience true joy and peace, live knowing that your life is a gift. Give it a try.

Being Grafted

Our lives do not come from ourselves and we do not live on our own. Our life is a gift from the Father. And we know that any life is dependent on so many things, but among them is oxygen as transported by the circulatory system. Our network of blood vessels is so intricate (how can anyone say it just so happened to be that way! It must have been designed by a Creator) and they each are joined together and are grafted onto a source. As Christians, we must be grafted onto a similar source of life, and that source is Christ Himself. Apart from Christ we have no life, and any life that we think we would be living is one that is unfulfilled and is one that we ultimately will feel to be lacking. So, we must graft ourselves onto Christ. Our Lord implores us to remain with Him as He remains in us so that we may truly be one with Him and the Father.

The Joys of Our Hardships

By our experiences, we know there are good times and bad times in life. There are moments when we feel we are on the top of the world, but also moments when we feel we are in the depths of a bottomless pit. Hardships are part of the human life. Hardships and difficulties allow us to enjoy and appreciate the good times all the more. Hardships and struggles instill in us a spirit of gratitude. It is the grace of God that transforms our human hardships and struggles into crosses that we will come to joyfully embrace. We will come to embrace those crosses joyfully because we know why we are carrying them. We carry them because Christ carried His for us. And we know we do not carry them alone. Christ carries them with us, and we must encourage one another for we are all journeying together. Just as His Cross brought about the salvation of the world, our crosses will enable us to share in the glory of the Cross. When we embrace our crosses and invite God to transform them, our crosses will become blessings.