"Rouse your power, and come to save us" (Psalm 80)

 In today's first reading, Isaiah 63: 16b-17, 19b,; 64: 2-7, the prophet Isaiah asks God why He allows us to "wander from [His] ways,  and harden our hearts so that we [no longer] fear you"?  As we wander away from God, Isaiah says that "our good deeds are like polluted rags". We have become "like unclean people."   "[W]e 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.  Yet, O Lord, you are our father; we are the clay and you the potter: we are all the work of your hands."

Each of us is an unique masterpiece of the Divine Potter. We belong to Him! And, in no way, is God going to abandon us, though God will allow us to wander away from Him. He is watching! He waits for the moment when we realize that we have departed from the right path. He waits for the moment when we realize that we have become like  "polluted rags"  in need of cleansing, purifying, restoring in the winepress of Jesus' blood and reconciled to God in the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Holy Eucharist, in which we are fed with  Jesus' body, blood, soul and divinity! In those sacraments, in the Holy Scriptures, in repentant and humble prayer--personal, communal or liturgical--we are cleansed, brought back to the Lord, aroused to cling to the Lord, delivered from our guilt!

St. Paul, in today's second reading, 1 Cor 1: 3-9, says, on our behalf, "I give thanks to my God always on your account for the grace of God bestowed on you in Christ Jesus, that in him you were enriched in every way, with all discourse and all knowledge, as the testimony to Christ was confirmed among you, so that you are  not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revelation of Our Lord Jesus Christ."  What a restoration in Christ Jesus, through the outpouring of Jesus' blood upon the cross to redeem us from our wayward ways, our wandering away from the right path, our being carried away by the wind into pits set up for us by Satan! Our Father/Mother God would have none of it! We belong to Him/Her, the Holy Almighty One!