Love Changes Everything

 Never let anything so fill you with sorrow as to make you forget the joy of Christ risen. -- Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta


How blessed we are to know Christ. What a gift it is to live this faith! I think sometimes we forget how blessed we are. How we truly have the fullness of truth and yet how often we do not take advantage of what all that means.  I know that I can and I know I need to be reminded everyday! I likened the matter to a friend by saying, well when you have always been rich and no one taught you the value of a dollar, then well, how can you ever appreciate the gift of the riches of all that you have! 


I believe that we must be poor to be rich! Why? Because when we are poor we are dependent on something greater to tend to our needs.   Our hunger calls us to ask and so when we receive our hearts truly understand the meaning of gift!  I know for myself it is awesome when I receive a gift of any magnitude--big or small, where there is love there is gift!  


Sometimes we need God the most when we have the most stuff. The poor and lowly teach us a lot about what it means to be humble and what it means to love.  They understand love because they know that without love they would have nothing else. Love carries, it transforms and makes all things new. Love changes everything! 


An analogy that comes to mind that illustrates this point is when we are carrying stuff in our arms of all shapes, sizes and weights.  Someone comes over to embrace us or love us.  Well in that moment, the desire is there to want to reciprocate, but you can't move to do so--why? Because you have too many things in your arms and in the way to love.  These things can be material, emotional, or mental. Any which way you look at it, it hinders you from being fully alive in love.   


I think too about my own journey.  How come i know stuff about the faith etc and there are so many people out there who just have no clue.  Including those in my own family! Well the only thing that I can ever think of in terms of this topic is that God needs you to be a light and a soft hand  in a judgemental and resentful world.  The funny part is that God always allows you to heal or be around that which you were.  You become the example to the people that find it too hard to be where you are.  They find it too hard to take on the responsibility that love calls us too. 


Think about it--when you ask people to go to mass with you or adoration or what have you--why won't they? It is an hour of there lives, that according to them, they will not be effected by anyway! Something in them knows that what they are exposing to them is truth! So the sin and darkness in them cowars at the light and truth--so that one hour could call them out or make them feel the guilt they have numbed themselves to. 
People who are living in darkness know full well that they are not living there! That is why what they need is love and not judgement.  They don't need to know they are wrong, they just need to know that they are loved no matter the decisions that they choose to make.  They are not wrong, but the choices they make might be and that is a great big distinction. When we are living in the dark, we know we need the light and we already are beating up by the fact that we ourselves think we are wrong. The last thing the person living in darkness needs is a spotlight on their wrong--they need a heart filled with love that shines a light that softens their hearts slowly but surely to the Lord.


So we are called to love the sinner and hate the sin! Christ did and still does. He calls each one of us in our richness to give to the poor.  He calls each one of us to fully live out our baptism by loving all those that cross our paths. He reminds that we too were once poor and that the only riches that we have is in his love.  
So do we need to call people out, sometimes! Do we need to bring people Christ, all the time.  But in both circumstances let us remember that what we are not living fully and completely we cannot bring to anyone else. So if you call someone out make sure you have walked in there shoes or that plank is out of your eyes and when you bring people Christ make sure that you have died and he is risen within your heart. 


Love changes everything--judgement keeps people closed and isolated. Satan likes to make sure we stay in the judgement seat of others so that people never learn what love is or rather who love is.