God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him will not be condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God. And this is the verdict, that the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come toward the light, so that his works might not be exposed. But whoever lives the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.
Reflection:
I thought about how when we were kids my sister and I would have tea parties, just she and I, with our Mom’s fine china. We knew we weren’t suppose to use it, but we were going to be really careful and put it back all cleaned before Mom got home. Well, we ended up breaking one of the little dessert plates while cleaning it. Mom was driving up the dirt driveway to the farm house where we lived, and panic set in… what do we do? Out of all the suggestions we had, we settled on hiding it under the house and not telling Mom. For some reason, Mom knew something was up, she just couldn't figure out what we did. She said we were guilty of something. One day, Mom finally found that one of her dishes was missing. She asked us if we knew where it was. My sister and I were so scared that we were going to get in trouble for being disobedient and using the fine china, that we turned around and decided to do something even worse, lie and not tell her what happened to the plate. We had GUILTY written all over our faces. She did not let up until we finally fessed up. She made us crawl under the house and retrieve the plate, and then she punished us for trying to lie to her. In the end, my sister and I talked about it, and decided that keeping that from her and feeling the guilt for all that time was far worse than the punishment we received, and we should always do our best to try to be truthful.
Looking back and viewing this as an adult..., what a beautiful thing Mom did by rescuing us from the darkness and helping us bring out the truth, exposing the light that we were trying to hide. Even today, there are choices between the darkness and the light, and one would think this choice is easy (and it should be easy), however, I still have things that I try to hide about myself, causing me to be in the darkness. God loves us so much that He continues to pursue us and give us His only begotten Son to rescue us from the darkness. Will we choose the light of Truth? God doesn’t want to condemn us for choosing the darkness, He only wants to save us with His love and Mercy. Will we believe in His Son and allow Him to rescue us?
Heavenly Father, we want to pray right now that we choose to live in the light rather than the darkness. We also pray for all of our priests to live this message of Love and Mercy and boldly proclaim your message to all that are in need of hearing it.
Saint Joseph, Pray for us!
May God bless us all!
