Living and Moving in Sync with God

In today's first reading, Acts 17: 15, 22-18:1, Paul reminds us that the "God who made the world and all that is in it, the Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in sanctuaries made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands because he needs anything. Rather it is [God] who gives to everyone life and breath and everything....In him we live and move and have our being...."   

"[W]e live and move and have our being" in God as a fish lives and moves and has its existence in water!  Without water a fish dies. Without God, you and I die. In water a fish thrives. In God you and I thrive.

God, Paul tells us, "does not dwell in sanctuaries made by human hands."  Where, then, does God dwell? If we "live and move and have our being in God," then God, an infinite, eternal Being separate and distinct from us, lives within us.  We are one with God and God is one with us, yet distinctly separate from us! We are not God and God is not us! God does exist apart from us but we do not live apart from God anymore than a fish lives apart from water or a branch cut off from a tree!

Oh, the intimacy of God! This intimate God is Creative Energy that gives life, sustains life, purifies life, transforms weakness into strength, disunity into unity, ugliness into beauty, sinfulness into holiness. And in doing all of this and more, God needs our cooperation, as we have been given a free will by God. We are capable of choosing evil over good, ugliness over beauty, as God will not take away our freedom to choose!  We are capable of being divisive and not cooperating with God's grace.  We are capable of choosing that which weakens our character instead of that which strengthens us as God's offspring!  The choice is always ours!

How did you choose today?

With, in, and through the Power of the Spirit, All Things Are Possible

In today’s first reading, Acts 9: 31-42, Peter, totally transformed by the outpouring of the Spirit upon him at Pentecost, is an instrument in the hands of Christ, healing the sick, the paralyzed, raising those who have died and proclaiming Jesus’ resurrection. He is doing everything in the name of Jesus, the Son of God, the Holy One whom he had denied, whom he had challenged when He spoke of going up to Jerusalem to be killed by the chief priests and leaders of the people, the man who jumped in to the waters to walk to Jesus and sunk out of fear of the elements, the one who chopped off the soldier’s ear, and the one who locked himself in the upper room out of fear of the Jews.  Now, baptized in the Spirit, he feared no one and never said “no” to Jesus again. He opened his mind, his heart and his will to the Spirit of Christ leading him, strengthening him, challenging him to act in His name without fear, without giving in to weaknesses, without pride, knowing, beyond doubt, that only in Christ Jesus is his salvation and only in Christ Jesus does he do the will of the Father.

The same is true for us. Apart from Jesus, relying upon our own strength, we, too, will challenge God, complain against God, begin a project and abandon it when the going gets tough. We, too, relying only on ourselves, are prone to deny the Lord in crucial circumstances or to engage in behaviors that are contrary to what God expects of us. On the other hands, with Jesus, nothing is impossible because we are acting as ones dependent on grace and grace alone. We, too, will get across the troubled waters of our lives only when we humbly call out for help. We will leave our comfort zones only because we are empowered by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, sent my Jesus, to take possession of our minds, our will, our hearts. 

In God, With God, Through God

God “gives to everyone life and breath and everything…’In him we live and move and have our being,’…[f]or we too are his offspring,’”  we read in today’s first reading, Acts 17: 15, 22-18:1.   In the Gospel, John John 16: 12-15,   Jesus  tells us that when the Advocate “comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth….He will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you. Everything that the Father has is mine; for this reason I told y9ou that he will take from what is mine and declare it to you.”

How awesome is the  relationship God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have developed with us. God who made all that is, the heavens and the earth, and all that is in them, God who  created man and woman in His likeness shares everything with us. The Spirit will bring us to this truth, in fact, to all truth:  the truth about our Creator, the truth about this universe, the truth about ourselves, the truth about a child in the womb, the truth about all men and women created equally in the eyes of God, truth about justice and love and mercy and all that has it origin in God and taught to us by Jesus.  We will come to realize that  God  “made from one the whole human race to dwell on the entire surface of the earth, and he fixed the ordered seasons and the boundaries of their regions, so that people might seek God, even perhaps grope for him and find him, though indeed he is not far from any one of us.” For ‘In him we live and move and have our being,’”!

How do my behaviors/attitudes reveal that I have come to know that God has given me “life and breath and everything,”  that  I “live and move and have[my] being” in God?  Would I treat others differently if I live from the belief that they, too, have been given “life and breath and everything” from God and that they, too, “live and move and have [their] being” in God?