Category: Ignatian Spirituality

What’s He up to?

Do you sometimes scratch your head and ask, just what is God up to? I don’t know about you, but when adversity or difficulties come, there’s a part of me that wants to run the other way. I only give God a fleeting thought as I do my best to avoid the harder things in life.

But running the other way or doing your best to avoid problems means that you really don’t believe God can bring a greater good out of the situation. God sometimes allows adversity to take you to a higher place. He wants to make you stronger. Will you do your part?

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The Lenten Journey

The word Lent is from the Anglo-Saxon lencten (spring). This penitential season of six Sundays and forty weekdays prepares us for the great feast of Easter, and it begins today.

Historically, Lent was the retreat-like final preparation for those who would be initiated into the Church at Easter. Many others began using the time for repentance and renewal.

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Time For Prayer

A quick look at the news today might cause you to dive into a tailspin. Massive earthquakes, oil prices rising 9% in a day, civil unrest rolling across the Middle East, unsustainable levels of debt. And that was just the headlines.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that everything is cycling out of control. That would be the case if everything depended upon us. Being people of faith, we know that the reality is that it God is in control. I scratch my head sometimes trying to figure out what He’s up to, but in the end, I know He is allowing these things to happen. Our job is to pray, and to trust.

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Finding God In All Things

Post author By seedthrower1
Post date 02/16/2011
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We all have days where it seems like nothing goes right. Hopefully, we’ve also experienced days were everything we put our hand to works out perfectly. I guess this pattern of positive and negative is built into the fabric of our daily living. The more we accept it, the easier it is for us to Find God In All Things.

This understanding of recognizing God in all things is one of the key concepts of Ignatian Spirituality. Instead of using the terms positive and negative, St. Ignatius used desolation (negative) and consolation (positive). Both are movements of the spiritual life, and we will encounter them over and over again in our daily living.

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Living the Gospel

When you really think about it, you can’t truly live the Gospel without suffering some pain. Last week, I was giving some students from the United Church of Christ a tour of our church. They asked about the stations of the cross, and why we had them displayed all around. It was a good question.

Jesus said that if we wanted to be his disciple, we were going to have to pick up our cross and follow him. The stations of the cross remind us that to be a Christian means that we’re going to experience some suffering along the way.

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Is God There?

Last night I was talking to my fourth grade class about God’s presence in their lives. As we sat in the sanctuary of our church, I asked them to think about ways God shows Himself to them throughout their day. Looking back to the previous week, could they see Him in the everyday events of their lives? Sometimes yes, sometimes no was the answer I got.

Most of us would probably answer in the same way. My trusty spiritual companion St. Ignatius, would ask us to go a little deeper. He’d ask us to find God in all things. God, who is always present, is also constantly trying to teach us something. The question is, do we who have eyes to see and ears to hear (Matthew 16:17) paying attention? St Ignatius to the rescue.

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Was It Really Random?

Yesterday, forty-two people from our Hispanic community were screened for Diabetes. They had previously taken a risk assessment at a Faith Fighting Diabetes event, and the results showed that they were at high risk for either having the disease or were pre-diabetic.

It was very humbling for me to walk into the crowded waiting room and see all the people there. This was the first screening we had set up. Knowing that these people were there because of something that happened to me is what humbled me.

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A Thoughtful Message

This past summer, one of my former staff members got married. Being a bit older, they have plenty of things already, and I was really struggling with what gift to give them. Then I remembered a friend telling me about an organization called Charity Water, which works to bring clean drinking water to people in Africa.

I went to their website and found out that for a $40 donation, two people would be able to drink clean water for 20 years. That’s right. It’s hard to believe, but for $10 billion dollars, we could eliminate this health crisis which kills more people in the world than all forms of violence combined. Americans spend about $450 billion on Christmas gifts each year.

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Deck The Halls

We had our first snow flurries today. Not much, and not for long, but a sure sign of things to come. Our cold weather prompted me to start breaking out the Christmas decorations.

This is way early for me, especially because I’m not expecting any company for the next couple of weeks.

Maybe it was the comment from my friend Will, the new dad 🙂 about how much he loves the Christmas Season.

Maybe it was my co-worker Jordan reminding me that this will be her son Brendan’s first Christmas 🙂

Whatever it was, something’s different. I usually like to hold on to Advent for as long as I can, since it sets the stage for a more Christ-centered celebration on the 25th.

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Me, A Saint?

Most of us don’t think we have it in us. We have this lofty vision of what a saint is, and we might believe our own faults and failures preclude us from ever having such a title attached to our names.

Well, that’s just not so. When Mother Theresa received the Nobel Peace Prize, she got up to the podium and said that, although she was grateful to receive the award, she wasn’t quite sure why she was getting it.

She went on to say that she felt that she had done nothing extraordinary, but rather she had simply done what we are all called to do. Another time, she was asked what was the difference between a sinner and a saint. She replied, “the saint kept getting up.” So, there is hope for us after all 🙂