The Friar Podcasts - preaching prayer and spiritual reflections

What an incredible group of friends. I don't know if it was a long way they had to carry this paralyzed man or somewhat short distance, but I can only imagine the scene as they got up on top of this building.

Now, the tiles, just so that you kind of understand the scene here, would have been likely made of clay. So when they're lowering Jesus down, they're paralytic down, they're actually, they dug through the tiles to open up the roof so they could do so. But I can only imagine how hard it was. I don't know that they would have had access to a ladder, for example. How did they both get on the roof and lower this person down?

But they had a primary goal to get the paralyzed man to Jesus. I think that we live in an age where we need to be those friends. We need to recognize that we have one primary goal because of our baptism, to bring people to Jesus. If we believe that Jesus has so changed our lives that we are no longer in our sin and we have the pathway to eternal life open, then why wouldn't we want to bring our friends to Jesus?

Of course, we know the challenge. It's not always easy to do so. Like, we don't know what everybody else reacted when they brought this paralyzed man to Jesus. Did they laugh at him? Did they mock them? Did anybody offer to help? We don't know.

We know that when we sometimes think of our role in telling others about Jesus, it can be the case that people don't understand, or that people think that it's too hard, it's too difficult, it's not normal, it's whatever. The other thing we need to know is how, in fact, do we get to Jesus?

They had to know that Jesus was here preaching in this house. How do we get there? Well, Isaiah tells us. You remember over the weekend I talked about how the Old Testament really can be best understood in light of the New Testament and vice versa, that there's a reaction or a dynamic interchange between the two.

And what did Isaiah talk about in the first reading today? The way. What does Jesus call himself? The way. Not only does Jesus want to heal us, he gives us the help so we know how to find him. Who is it that God is asking you to accompany to Jesus today?

On the friar, you can listen to our homilies (based on the readings of the day) and reflections. You can also ask us to pray for you or to pray for others. You can subscribe to our website to be informed whenever we publish an update.

If you belong to a gym, you see the traditional pattern of who is present. If it's shortly after the first of the year, the gym is crowded. Everybody is there because this is going to be the year that they finally get into shape. Of course, we can probably predict what's going to happen.

It's very full in the first week of January, not quite as full by the third week of January. And by the time we get to February, things are pretty much back to normal. And that's really the story of our life in so many ways, isn't it? We sometimes have good intentions, but not always perseverance in those intentions.

And the liturgical season of the year recognizes this because every year we kind of get the opportunity to hit the reset button. Advent is the beginning of the church year, and so in many ways we started last week by saying Happy New Year, because it is the new year that we recognize in grace the ways in which Jesus is present in our lives.

And today's readings really help us to focus on what enables us to persevere, because things are not always easy. It is, in fact, quite difficult sometimes. The road, as we hear in Isaiah, can be rocky, filled with potholes and making it difficult to travel from one place to another in terms of growth. We can find in our lives that as much as we want to become better in this particular area or that, we just can't seem to put it together.

Today's readings remind us of the very good news that really it's not up to us. It's not really about working harder and harder and harder. It's about really opening our heart more and more to the help that Jesus gives us to do what we should do. Opening our hearts more and more to becoming the person that Jesus has made us to be. That's the good news.

As we look around, we hardly can—let me rephrase this. As we look around, it can be easy to believe that we're not in a world of good news, because there are so many things that are not good all around us. I can't keep track of all of the places in the world where there's violence, where there's war. There's just too many of them. We simply haven't figured out how to live together in peace.

I know that this time of year for some can be a very difficult time of year. While certainly it is true that this time of year can be exciting and wonderful and tremendous, it can be a time of year where, in fact, we recognize the gifts that we have and the blessings that we have. For others, it can be a time of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. It can hardly feel like the good news is what we are preparing for.

But Isaiah and the Gospel help us to remember that in the midst of it all, God has this amazing plan for us. It is the plan of salvation. If we read the history of the Bible, the parts that are, in fact, history, we see that it is not simply the recounting of events. It is the recounting of the ways in which God has been active in history to help us to experience the salvation He desires to give us.

In Isaiah's first reading, the promises are amazing. It's why, in so many ways, Isaiah is the prophet of Advent, because he reminds us of the great hope to which we are called. He starts with something that I mentioned to the kids not too long ago, with comfort. Because, quite frankly, in the midst of this horrible and terrible world, we need to be reminded that we're not alone. That while things can seem to be bad, God is more powerful.

And so Isaiah reminds the people who have gone astray that they have the opportunity to come back because of what God is going to do in their lives. The Gospel reinforces this idea that the Bible is really about the history of our salvation. . .

I have every advent, except for this one, because I haven't really gotten the energy to dig through my boxes of books to find it, read a book by Caryll Houselander called The Reed of God. It's one of my favorites, and part of the reason it's one of my favorites is what she kind of writes in the introduction, where she recalls that when she was a little girl, she was told, never do anything that you can't imagine the Virgin Mary doing.

And Caryll Houselander writes, I couldn't imagine the Virgin Mary doing anything. Mary was not a real figure for her as a child. She seemed kind of way out there as some kind of ephemeral reality, not someone who actually lived and moved and acted in our world.

And that's really what Carylll Houselander then seeks to do, is to really make Mary more human, more real, more observable. And I think we need to remember this too, that we know of course the end of the story, and Mary was revered and had a special place in the church from the earliest days of Christianity. In fact, maybe because we believe she's only fully human, the church worked out what it believed about Mary before it worked out what it believed about Jesus.

And so we celebrate this feast today really because God decided in His grace, in His goodness, to give Mary a special privilege or favor. Now we can say, yes, she was conceived without sin. Paul tells us in fact that sin was something we all kind of inherited in some way once sin entered the world.

But what was the privilege? Why was this such an important thing for God to have done? Or why was it, as is often the language, why was it fitting that this be done? And I'm going to suggest today that the biggest reason, the primary reason, was that Mary was given the privilege of baptism, of being the first disciple of her son because of her fidelity and her faithfulness.

If we read about her life, we see that it was hardly the life that was kind of a golden life with no difficulties. Even today when she encounters an angel, it does not immediately fill her with joy. She doesn't pat herself on the back and say, oh, isn't this wonderful and tremendous an angel is visiting me.

She's terrified. She's terrified. The angel has to say, Mary, don't be afraid. You found favor with God. And we know from this moment on when she says yes, when she gives her consent to becoming the mother of Jesus, the troubles aren't going to end there. In fact, they're just beginning in today's gospel.

She has to flee. She has to move as a pregnant mother in a time where travel was quite difficult and then flee after the birth of her son and then struggle to understand the son of hers. One of my favorite moments in the gospel is when the mother of Jesus and his relatives come to get Jesus. But it says this because they are convinced he is out of his mind. They don't understand this Jesus at all. And in the midst of this lack of understanding, Mary remains faithful. She is by the side of Jesus until the very end. In that she is the perfect model for us. We too have been given the grace of baptism. We too, like Mary, are called to do magnificent and miraculous things for our God. We too, like Mary, are going to be given invitations by God to which we are to say yes. Let it be done according to your will. As we celebrate this feast day of the Blessed Virgin Mary, let us ask the Lord to give us the grace he gave her and let us ask her for her prayers that we, like her, might be faithful.

It's interesting when you listen to two groups of people that have radically different views about the Bible. On the one hand, there are Christian fundamentalists who take the Bible literally. Their basic argument is that if God gets it wrong, let's say in the story of Genesis, then how do we know God didn't get it wrong in everything else? Therefore, everything must be literally true because God cannot lie.

On the opposite extreme are what I would call the scientific atheists. They notice the same problem. If God gets it wrong on this particular spot, as we observe the universe, there's limited evidence to suggest that it could have in any way happened as is recounted in the book of Genesis. And they say, well, if God gets it wrong here, then God gets it wrong everywhere. Therefore, there must be no God.

It's very interesting because both of those extremes identify a problem and they wind up with opposite solutions to the problem. But beginning with the Church Fathers, there's always been a sense that we have to think carefully about the Scriptures. Because more than anything else, the Bible is about a way of seeing the world. It's about a way of understanding what happens to us, about our relationship with God, about what gives meaning to our lives.

And if we don't read the Bible in that way, we can be led astray. The Bible is not really a book. It's a library of books. We have some very wonderful creation stories, very common for anybody to think about, how did we get here? How did all this beautiful stuff come to be?

There are books that are historical in nature and we can identify even from non-religious sources the history and the historical truth of what is recounted. There is beautiful poetry, which the church from the earliest days saw as the way to pray like Jesus Christ in the Liturgy of the Hours. There is, I would say, a legal code. And I've talked to more than one lawyer who says that the legal code laid out in Leviticus and Deuteronomy is actually quite good.

And of course, there are the experiences of Jesus. Now the danger for us, even as Catholics, in seeing the way things are, especially among those scholars who at one time were of this mind, there was a temptation to dismiss and try to find a reason explanation for everything that happened in the Bible. And so there was a tendency to dismiss the miracles of Jesus as being something else.

But the Bible is really about helping us to see where it is that God is active and alive in our world. Now I mention that all really as a preface to what we get in the book of the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah is painting a picture of the way the world should be.

And much like so many in the Bible, we have to understand the world from a biblical view. That God is active and alive in history. That God does not create evil, but for a better purpose allows it. And that God makes promises, but not only that, God keeps the promises He makes. And so what do we read about this wonderful world?

The book of Isaiah has a privileged place because there are so many instances where it appears to point to the Christ. It appears to point to Jesus who will come to save us. In the book of the prophet Isaiah, the reading that we heard from today, this biblical worldview is evident right at the very beginning. A shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse.

Now who was Jesse? David's father. And so here we get a sense that yes, this was the promise that someone from the house of David, someone from the lineage of David would ultimately be the great King, the Messiah.

We understand that in painting this world, Isaiah identifies the gifts that are necessary to live in this world. And they aren't the kinds of gifts we would look at to be successful economically or to have a successful job necessarily. I mean, I suppose some of them could be seen as adaptable. . .

It's interesting when you listen to two groups of people that have radically different views about the Bible. On the one hand, there are Christian fundamentalists who take the Bible literally. Their basic argument is that if God gets it wrong, let's say in the story of Genesis, then how do we know God didn't get it wrong in everything else? Therefore, everything must be literally true because God cannot lie.

On the opposite extreme are what I would call the scientific atheists. They notice the same problem. If God gets it wrong on this particular spot, as we observe the universe, there's limited evidence to suggest that it could have in any way happened as is recounted in the book of Genesis. And they say, well, if God gets it wrong here, then God gets it wrong everywhere. Therefore, there must be no God.

It's very interesting because both of those extremes identify a problem and they wind up with opposite solutions to the problem. But beginning with the Church Fathers, there's always been a sense that we have to think carefully about the Scriptures. Because more than anything else, the Bible is about a way of seeing the world. It's about a way of understanding what happens to us, about our relationship with God, about what gives meaning to our lives.

And if we don't read the Bible in that way, we can be led astray. The Bible is not really a book. It's a library of books. We have some very wonderful creation stories, very common for anybody to think about, how did we get here? How did all this beautiful stuff come to be?

There are books that are historical in nature and we can identify even from non-religious sources the history and the historical truth of what is recounted. There is beautiful poetry, which the church from the earliest days saw as the way to pray like Jesus Christ in the Liturgy of the Hours. There is, I would say, a legal code. And I've talked to more than one lawyer who says that the legal code laid out in Leviticus and Deuteronomy is actually quite good.

And of course, there are the experiences of Jesus. Now the danger for us, even as Catholics, in seeing the way things are, especially among those scholars who at one time were of this mind, there was a temptation to dismiss and try to find a reason explanation for everything that happened in the Bible. And so there was a tendency to dismiss the miracles of Jesus as being something else.

But the Bible is really about helping us to see where it is that God is active and alive in our world. Now I mention that all really as a preface to what we get in the book of the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah is painting a picture of the way the world should be.

And much like so many in the Bible, we have to understand the world from a biblical view. That God is active and alive in history. That God does not create evil, but for a better purpose allows it. And that God makes promises, but not only that, God keeps the promises He makes. And so what do we read about this wonderful world?

The book of Isaiah has a privileged place because there are so many instances where it appears to point to the Christ. It appears to point to Jesus who will come to save us. In the book of the prophet Isaiah, the reading that we heard from today, this biblical worldview is evident right at the very beginning. A shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse.

Now who was Jesse? David's father. And so here we get a sense that yes, this was the promise that someone from the house of David, someone from the lineage of David would ultimately be the great King, the Messiah.

We understand that in painting this world, Isaiah identifies the gifts that are necessary to live in this world. And they aren't the kinds of gifts we would look at to be successful economically or to have a successful job necessarily. I mean, I suppose some of them could be seen as adaptable. . .

We're going to hear a lot from the prophet Isaiah over this season of Advent. In many ways, he's the Advent Saint. Why is that? Well, I think we have to look at the mission of Isaiah. We have to look at what it meant for him to be a prophet and what he encountered during his time.

He was a prophet at a difficult time for Israel. Things were not going well. The faith was not robust. And people who lived in Israel were really unconcerned with God. Moreover, the king, rather than following the example of the great kings of Israel who turned to the Lord, did not do so. He, in fact, found himself in his own life seeking to find solutions that relied on his power, his wisdom, his ability.

And so the role of Isaiah is really twofold. One is the very difficult task of saying things need to change. And maybe even more difficult, you need to change. That's the first message of Advent, that we need to change.

That doesn't mean that we're bad people. It doesn't mean that we're horrible. But it does mean that we do not always choose to follow God completely and fully. We can fall into the same trap as King Ahaz was mentioned, I think, in the Office of Readings today.

He thought he had a great idea making a treaty with a powerful nation, rather than trusting in God. It didn't work so well.

But the second thing is what's most important. I mentioned that one way to divide Isaiah is the book of woe and the book of consolation. What is the consolation? The consolation is our relationship with God. And so in this first reading, we get this tension between woe and consolation. On the one hand, we're invited to recognize that the great promise of God is far greater than we could imagine.

While at the same time, being told that we will be accountable for the way we live. It's not just do whatever we want because God loves us and he'll take us anyway. There's a certain way in which we have to live. There's a certain way in which we need to enter into our relationship with Jesus.

And that, in fact, is the purpose of Advent. To shake us up a little bit so that we are watching and waiting and being ready to see the presence of Jesus in our hearts and in our lives. Being reminded of the great promise that only gets fulfilled when he comes again. And being reminded that in everything, God loves us more than we can know or understand.

On the friar, you can listen to our homilies (based on the readings of the day) and reflections. You can also ask us to pray for you or to pray for others. You can subscribe to our website to be informed whenever we publish an update.

The word watch has at least, I think, three meanings. One can be watch as I do something. I can show you how to do something, and you can learn how to do it by watching me. Sometimes the word watch can be to point out something dramatic and wonderful, and it's awe-inspiring.

This week, although I have to say that I was not ready to go out and take a look at them, particularly in a heavily lighted urban area, but if you were attentive in many parts of Minnesota, you could see the northern lights, something I have in fact seen before, and they are worth seeing.

Though many of the pictures came from the middle of the night, and I think it was just as easy to rely on my memories of the northern lights than to have lamented the fact that at, I don't know, three or four in the morning, I was not awake.

But today's readings give us the sense of watch that is much more about being on guard, much more like the sense of watch out. There's something quite risky. Be careful. Keep your eyes open. There's a sense that in the readings today, we are in some sense of danger if we're not careful, if we're not watchful, that we need to look carefully because if we don't, we could be in real difficulty.

The first reading from the book of the prophet Isaiah is really about a time when Isaiah is sent forth to warn people that if they continue to live the way that they live, things will not end well. His book is traditionally divided into two parts. There are multiple parts, but for one way of dividing it, there is the book of woe, which believe it or not, was not what we heard today, and the book of consolation.

It is the book of woe that reminds the people again and again and again, these are the bad things that will happen if you don't change your life. And the book of consolation is, and here is what God will do for you if you allow him to do so.

That's where the first reading comes from. The words are harsh. The words are challenging because they remind us that we have not always been faithful. And they do so actually in pretty dramatic and powerful ways. They really have harsh, harsh language for the people.

Listen again. Behold, you are angry, and we are sinful;
all of us have become like unclean people,
all our good deeds are like polluted rags;
we have all withered like leaves,
and our guilt carries us away like the wind.
There is none who calls upon your name,
who rouses himself to cling to you;
for you have hidden your face from us
and have delivered us up to our guilt.

Not easy words to hear as a description of the people. And if the reading were to stop there, we would be quite sad indeed. But fortunately for us, it does not.

Yet, O LORD, you are our father;
we are the clay and you the potter:
we are all the work of your hands.

Yet, O Lord, you are our Father. We are the clay and you are the potter. We are all the work of your hands. And there in is the consolation that God doesn't leave us in our sinfulness. God forms us and shapes us into the persons we were made to be. And that is wonderful indeed.

One very Dominican phrase, and I hear when I was at the SEEK Conference last year in St. Louis with thousands and thousands of young people, Sister Miriam James said this over and over again, and I thought it was such a good, good line.

She said this. It is good that you exist. And God says that to each one of us. It is good that we exist. It is good that we hold out hope for who we can become when we turn our lives over to Jesus and allow Jesus to turn us into the people that He has made us to be. And that's phenomenally good news.

And all we need to do is to pay attention to the words of Jesus. Watch. Watch what God is going to do. And God is going to do great things. Watch because God is awesome. God is marvelous and tremendous. . .

Andrew was the first to be called by Jesus. Imagine if Andrew had said, well there, good, I'm done. I don't have any more responsibilities in the faith. I've been called by Jesus and I've accepted his call.

But we know he didn't do that. He shared his faith. He went to his brother. He said, we have found the Messiah. This, ironically, is always close to the end of the year. Sometimes it actually winds up in the season of Advent.

But today we celebrate Andrew and Andrew in many ways is the patron saint for evangelization. Because Andrew is willing to share his belief in Jesus. I would say this makes Andrew really kind of a patron saint for the time in which we find ourselves.

Andrew's influence was enough that when James and John were seen, they too were part of the new band of disciples. And we know from other instances of the gospel that there were the women who followed Jesus.

We know the women were faithful to Jesus all the way to the end of the cross. Many of the only ones, except for John, who's called in today's gospel, all the rest at the foot of the cross were women, faithful, believing in Jesus.

I could also say that today is a very Dominican feast because the founding of the Dominican Order by Saint Dominic really had two foundational components. The first was the first group of Dominicans that Dominic founded, the nuns, the monasteries. There's really a distinction in Dominican life between the nuns who lived in a monastery, like our nuns, for instance, in this province in Farmington Hills, Michigan, or in Girard, Illinois.

Later, there also became Dominican sisters who gave their lives here, for example, by teaching in our school. Dominic began with the nuns because he believed that his endeavor would in no way be successful if it didn't start with prayer. Then was the second component, sharing the good news that Jesus was the Messiah with a people whose lives were very difficult, very hard, and people who had heard little or nothing about Jesus at all.

And it's this letter from St. Paul to the Romans that kind of forms the basis of what we understand, that primarily each of us is called to share the good news, not because we will it, not because we desire it, but because God sends us. When we are baptized, we are given a profound mission to share the good news.

And so we do what we do. We witness to this faith because we respond to the grace of God who then in turn sends us, the Holy Spirit sends us forth to proclaim this good news. In many respects, for a long time, we didn't have to worry much about it. We didn't have to worry really about sharing the good news because people just came.

The height of the Catholic Church in many respects in this country was in the 50s. Schools were packed, churches were big, families were large, everything. We even had a president in the White House for the first time in 1960 who was Catholic.

Will we regain the common gift that Jesus gives to each one of us by sending us forth to share the good news? If we believe that we have a gospel message that has so changed our lives that it has given us fulfillment and happiness and grace, then why would we want not to share this great gift with others whose lives are broken in a world that is difficult, in a world that suffers?

Today, recognize that each one of us have been called and sent by the Holy Spirit and let us resolve with at least one other person today that we will share the good news of our salvation.

On the friar, you can listen to our homilies (based on the readings of the day) and reflections. You can also ask us to pray for you or to pray for others. You can subscribe to our website to be informed whenever we publish an update.

These readings build on what we heard yesterday from the book of the prophet Daniel. We missed a little bit of a part here because Nebuchadnezzar is deeply troubled by the fact that he has had this dream and none of the people from his own kingdom can tell him what it means. But Daniel can. And really it's a prediction that describes pretty accurately what will become of the world around Daniel. And in particular what will happen after Nebuchadnezzar.

Remember, Nebuchadnezzar was a very powerful but not a very nice king. There was lots of persecution in his time and he was fickle. There were some things that weren't always lasting in what he wanted. Sometimes he'd get upset about something and then not so much at all.

The gospel also speaks about kind of this end of time prediction where in practical terms the temple is in fact destroyed. But in more realistic ways it's a signal that nothing here lasts forever. We see this type of understanding that there's a certain temporary nature to the things of this earth in other religions too but probably most notably in Buddhism where they make these beautiful artworks for example these mandalas which are made typically of sand and they're beautiful.

But then they're completely destroyed almost immediately after they're made because nothing is permanent. And the end of the year in the church kind of reminds us of what truly is permanent. It's really to get our attention so that we can see what we should really hold our hope in, what we should really cling to, what we should really make the priority of our life and that is our relationship with God.

Many in this gospel will be fooled. People will come. We see it all the time. Every now and then there's great excitement because somebody predicts that such and such a time is going to be the end of the world. The prediction comes, the prediction goes and we're still here.

But there are also people who come really with the point simply of terrifying and not of leading. Think about really the state of our world. It would be easy and understandable to get quite discouraged about the way things are.

Everywhere we look it seems that Jesus' predictions are absolutely true. Nations rising against nations, wars, insurrections, earthquakes, famines, plagues, suffering is all around us. It seems that really the world is so broken that if we think of it only reasonably we'd say it just simply can't be fixed. Things are just too far gone. We just have to kind of pay attention to our own lives and do whatever.

But what Jesus is encouraging us to do, particularly in these kind of end time gospels, is to get us to think about what it is that he can do for us. How it is that he can heal brokenness. What it is that he can do to enable us to witness to the power of God's love in people's lives. We may not be able to heal every brokenness in the world, but Jesus can.

We are called to be those witnesses who don't give in to fear, but in fact ask Jesus to increase our faith. Let us ask the Lord today to help us to come to see how it is that he longs to give us eternal life, that he longs to fulfill our hearts, that he longs to give us peace. He longs to give us an eternal relationship with him that has no end.

On the friar, you can listen to our homilies (based on the readings of the day) and reflections. You can also ask us to pray for you or to pray for others. You can subscribe to our website to be informed whenever we publish an update.

I don't like group projects. When I was in school, I never really liked it when we had to work with others. And there's a reason. There's a very obvious reason, and I've had to address it as a teacher, which I'll tell you about in a minute.

But I didn't like group projects because I didn't trust the other people in the group to do what they said they were going to do. I didn't trust. Now as a teacher, I learned to address this in some ways by being quite blunt with students. I remember going up to more than one student and saying, you're the person that no one hopes is in their group because you don't do any work. Don't be that person.

Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn't. Trust. Trust is the basis of any meaningful and important relationship. We cannot really have a relationship with anybody we do not trust. And trust is a common theme that we see in today's readings.

In the first reading, these three young men are in service of King Nebuchadnezzar. Now King Nebuchadnezzar was not a nice man. He was a brutal king who readily killed anyone who looked at him the wrong way. And so it's quite obvious we can see that that's true because of the fear that the Chief Chamberlain, who had to be trusted by Nebuchadnezzar in some way to get that position, and yet the Chief Chamberlain is very afraid. He doesn't want to incur the wrath of King Nebuchadnezzar.

Certainly the four young men, Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, knew this as well. He had taken over the reign of King Jehoiakim, and he had brought these men into exile. And yet they trusted in God. On some level we could say, well, what's the big deal? Eat whatever.

But on a completely different level, by refusing to abandon the faith that they practiced before they were exiled, they're making a profound statement and witness about their priorities in life. Namely, they will do everything they can to follow the Lord God. They are all in, to use a modern phrase.

In the Gospel, we also have a story of tremendous trust. This widow puts in two small coins, presumably not worth very much, but they're the only two coins she has. She completely trusts that God will never be outdone in generosity, and that by placing her trust in the Lord God, she is able to give all that she has.

Christianity is one big group project. We cannot really be a good Christian unless we are willing to seek the people we can trust and to reach out to those we have not yet been able to trust because we do not know them. But one thing we can do, and that is to stand with humility before our God and place our lives completely in His hands so that like the four in the first reading and the widow in the Gospel, we too might have complete trust in God.

On the friar, you can listen to our homilies (based on the readings of the day) and reflections. You can also ask us to pray for you or to pray for others. You can subscribe to our website to be informed whenever we publish an update.