Welcome to the last in the series: Being the Child God Made You where we're exploring how to be the child that Jesus asks us to be. Today we'll be talking about God made us to be satisfied only in God.

Excerpts:

God has made us for himself. He is providing for us, nourishing us, protecting us, warming us, delighting us... As long as we keep our hearts open, begging for him and his life, we will receive all he is giving us.

What gets in the way of this inbuilt hunger for God? For each of us there would be a different list. One of the habits in the following list might be on yours: hours of scrolling through social media feeds, trying to do what only God can do, trying to change people around you instead of changing yourself, numbing habits, grasping for empty fillers like higher salaries, success, possessions, status... When we are satisfied with what can never satisfy us....

One thing we can do to increase our hunger for God is to avoid these ultimately unsatisfactory fillers and meditate instead on these famous words of St. Augustine who said: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

To connect to more resources for spiritual formation: www.touchingthesunrise.com

Welcome to the sixth in the series: Being the Child God Made You where we're exploring how to be the child that Jesus asks us to be. Today we'll be talking about how to accept our own neediness and also how to receive God's love, especially when we find it difficult.

Excerpts:

Recently on retreat I found myself asking Jesus: “Will you leave me, drop me, because I am not interesting enough?” Isn’t that the fear we all have. That somehow God won’t be so captivated with love for us that he’ll decide we are not worth being with for the long haul?

These were Jesus’ words I felt that he said in my heart:

“It is I who have planted my tent on your land, It is I who have desired to possess your soul... It is I who have chosen you. My choice is irrevocable. I choose to love your story—all of it. It is not a journey from bad to good. It is a life from seed to blossom. You have survived the blights and bugs, the storms, the bending and breaking, MY mending and molding. And now in MY garden, you are blossoming. It is ALL good.”

To connect to more resources for spiritual formation: www.touchingthesunrise.com

Welcome to the fifth in the series: Being the Child God Made You where we're exploring how to be the child that Jesus asks us to be. Today we'll be talking about Mary who teaches us how to receive the Spirit.

Excerpts:

Finally, the apostles had gathered around the Mother of Jesus after he had ascended into heaven, waiting with her for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Mary knew well the presence, almost the “feel”—spiritually speaking—of being inhabited, of being a Temple, of the Spirit of Jesus. She had profound spiritual sensitivity and was no stranger to the movement of the Spirit, through whom the Son of God took flesh within her. At the Annunciation she became the Mother of Jesus, the Mother of the Son of God, and at that moment, in some mysterious way, the Mother of us, all of us who are the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ. In the Cenacle, as the Spirit is poured out on all Jesus’ disciples praying there, Mary is manifested as a type of the Church who, as Mother herself, will give birth to children of God at the baptismal fonts of every country and every time through the grace poured out by the Spirit. This grace is a gift given on the initiative of God, purifying and elevating our nature without suppressing or changing it in its very being....

Mary, Mother of the Church, teach me how to be a mother to people who have fallen away from the Church. Inspire me how to enter into the troubled moments of others’ lives with a quiet invitation to accompany me to the Eucharist or adoration, there to meet your Son. Encourage me to say a gentle word of faith at a time when their heart is ready to receive it. Mary, Mother of the Church, pray for us....

To connect to more resources for spiritual formation: www.touchingthesunrise.com

Welcome to the fourth in the series: Being the Child God Made You where we're exploring how to be the child that Jesus asks us to be. Today we'll be talking about how we belong to the King of Kings and the Lord of the Universe. We truly are royalty!

Excerpts:

So amazing! Yet this reality, this truth that is hinted at on every page of God’s word, is so hard to remember about ourselves and about others. Jesus, the Son of God, loves us. Jesus chooses us. We belong to the King of Kings and the Lord of the Universe. In Isaiah there is more than a hint:

“You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord,

...You shall be called My Delight Is in Her” (Isaiah 62:3, 4)....

Baptism is what makes us royalty. I follow the royal family in Great Britain. There people are born into royalty. We, instead, through Baptism, having no claim on being a part of the Royal Family of God, have been made a “partaker of the divine nature,” member of Jesus Christ and a temple of the Holy Spirit....

To connect to more resources for spiritual formation: www.touchingthesunrise.com

Welcome to the third in the series: Being the Child God Made You where we're exploring how we fill God with joy.

Excerpts:

It is as if John the Evangelist, John who had laid his head on the heart of Christ at the last supper and listened to the love that beat in his Lord’s most sacred and divine Heart, was trying to find the words to convince us that we are God’s children. Certainly, we’ve heard that a billion times before: with baptism we become God’s children. Do we consider how BIG A DEAL this is? My niece and nephew often played fondly with children of their friends. But now that they have their own child, it is a different story altogether. This is THEIR CHILD....

Ask the Holy Spirit to help you slow down enough to catch the thoughts you say to yourself about what things mean and who you are. Notice which type of thoughts make you feel happy, rested, trusting. And which thoughts depress, sadden, and frustrate you.

Make a list of each. At the beginning of the day visualize two or three things you know will happen that day and watch yourself internalizing the thoughts of a CHILD OF GOD. At the end of the day you can look briefly back at these same situations and notice where the other type of thoughts snuck in. Relive the situation in your mind at that point internalizing the attitudes and beliefs of a CHILD OF GOD....

To connect to more resources for spiritual formation: www.touchingthesunrise.com

Welcome to the first in the series: Being the Child God Made You where we're exploring how to be the child that Jesus asks us to be. Today we'll be talking about how how difficult it is sometimes to believe that God made us good and beautiful.

Excerpts:

Can you say to yourself, “God made something beautiful and strong and good and tender and kind when he made me.” What do you feel deep within yourself when you say these words about yourself? Can you notice your thoughts, any emotions, even physical sensations?

In my early steps of my own journey to accept being loved by God, I noticed that I would physically resist believing this: my stomach would tense up, my mind would freeze, and my emotions become rock....

Finally say to your heart: “It’s okay. I see you responding in this way. I can understand that. I can sense what you are needing, even if I can’t give it to you right now. I want you to hear these words which are true: “The God who created you, loves you each and every day, in each and every moment of every day of your life. He can’t stop loving you, because he himself is love. Even if you can’t hear these words now, they are true. Someday you will be able to welcome them and entrust yourself to the One who made you with great trust. I promise.”...

To connect to more resources for spiritual formation: www.touchingthesunrise.com

Welcome to the first in the series: Being the Child God Made You where we're exploring how to be the child that Jesus asks us to be. Today we'll be talking about how to accept our own neediness and also how to receive God's love, especially when we find it difficult.

Excerpts:

I heard these words in my heart: “You are just as helpless, and lovely, and loved as this tiny baby. She isn’t doing a single thing to ingratiate herself to anyone, other than to just be. Yet she is so endearing as she expresses what she needs and her parents jump to be there at her side, providing what she can’t provide for herself.”...

It takes a huge act of courage to tell someone we need something. We might be refused. We might be rejected. We might be ridiculed for what we can’t do ourselves. This dynamic, familiar to us all, looks one way as kids and another way when we are in the height of our adult years, and still another when we are in our senior years. To admit we can’t do something that is essential to a job we hold is risky. To admit we can no longer accomplish what is required for basic daily living may feel humiliating. To surrender what we really want to happen for ourselves or for another could feel like failure. Only the courageous are willing to be as honest as a baby about what they are undergoing, feeling, and needing....

To connect to more resources for spiritual formation: www.touchingthesunrise.com

Celebrating the Magi who followed a star in their search for the newly born King is a great opportunity to reflect on the stars we follow, the searches we have made during our life, what we have found, where we are, and where we are going.

Highlights:

Questions about life’s meaninglessness, about the way in which our days pass like vapor, about how all that we do and accomplish seems to vanish without a trace as we age, these burden not just the heart of Qoheleth in today’s first reading, but at certain points in our lives these questions haunt us too. I once heard that the book of Ecclesiastes identifies the question to which the whole of Revelation is the answer. In this quickly changing world, all that our life has been seems to slip through our fingers, and our heart longs for life, true life, life that is a treasure that neither moth nor rust can destroy.

There is something cyclical in this description of continual, unending, “coming and going” of things. In this reading there is no sense of the enduring, of divine gift and guidance and mission, of an end which has been ordained for all things by God. Instead, the more things change, as the saying goes, the more things stay the same, endlessly repeating to seemingly no purpose.

Today many experience life in this way. Not being grounded in the fertile soil of God’s action and love, much of what constitutes activity in our world seems to have no real meaning. I believe that during the pandemic many began to feel this way. The tasks they had been doing in their jobs were now no longer satisfying to them, no longer seemed purposeful, no longer worth devoting their whole life to. They began to seek something more meaningful to do with their careers.

It is ultimately only God who truly defines us and the purpose of our lives, their unending purpose.

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Highlights:

In the Gospel passage that recounts the calling of the tax collector, Matthew Jesus shows us that he is where we are. Whether we are living a holy life, struggling with temptations inundating us like a hurricane, or lost in the mire of vice or sin, Jesus is always passing by.

Jesus is not passing by intent on avoiding us. He is passing by in order to see us, to show us that we are seen with the eyes of respect and love. Jesus sees us, as we most deeply are. He delights in us, for he has made all things good.

There are many reasons why I want to avoid your gaze, Jesus. I don’t feel worthy. I don’t know how to respond to you. I’m afraid. But here you are, passing by, seeing me as you saw Matthew.

I hope you stay in touch. Sign up for my newsletter here: https://touchingthesunrise.com/newsletter/