Living your Faith

Many of us run our lives out of a calendar and if you look at one long enough, you can see patterns and priorities. Work gets labeled a green color and family gets yellow, and before long every hour of the week has been sorted into its proper box. 

Hopefully, somewhere in there sits time for Mass.

The system works: busy people keep their commitments straight. It’s also easy to look at the Mass block and feel that God’s share has been set aside, so the rest of the week can belong to us.

Hm. 

Let’s look at a typical Tuesday afternoon, when a meeting runs long and the person across the table is testing your patience; the thought of bringing God into things might feel slightly out of place in this moment, as if he were a guest who wandered into the wrong room of the house.

Similarly the Pharisees tried to trap Jesus with this same dichotomy when they handed him a coin and asked about taxes. He asked whose image was stamped on it, and when they answered Caesar, he told them to give Caesar what was his and give God what was God’s. The coin carried Caesar’s face, and each of us carries God’s, made in his image.

Think of the calendar differently: its hours are the life of someone who belongs to God, which makes the Tuesday meeting as much his as the hour in the pew. 

Think of your annoying co-worker differently too: they may be testing your patience but they also carry the same image you do, stamped there by the same hand. Your Tuesday afternoon meeting starts to look like a place where God has been present all along.

To be clear, I’m not asking you to cram more religion into an already full week; what I’m asking for is a perspective shift: God already has the whole week, and what he’s after is our awareness that he’s in it with us. 

There’s a Catholic habit for exactly this, called the Morning Offering, where you hand the coming day to God before it begins, the meetings and errands and conversations included, trusting that ordinary work offered to him becomes something he can use. It can be as simple as saying, ‘Lord, everything I do today is yours.’

This week’s invitation: Pick one ordinary block on your calendar, something routine like a weekly meeting or the grocery run, and before it starts, offer it to God in a single sentence: This hour is yours. Then go about it as you normally would, paying attention to the people you meet along the way as bearers of His image. This small habit closes the distance between Sunday and the rest of the week. The ordinary hours begin to carry the shape of an offering.

The coin went back to Caesar, and he was welcome to it. What God asked for was worth far more: the people he made in his own image, and every ordinary hour they carry that image into the world, whether in a conference room or a checkout line.

We love to get them.

We don’t always love the ‘going.’

Many of us have an invitation sitting in our phones right now, like a text about a birthday dinner for a great friend this weekend, and the reply keeps getting pushed to later because a ‘yes’ means committing and a ‘no’ means disappointing someone.

So the message stays unanswered.

The parable Jesus tells us this Sunday has guests who are invited to a wedding feast and give reasons that sound entirely plausible: a farm to look after, a business to run. I recognize myself in this because busyness doesn’t really feel like a refusal when we’re in the moment; it feels like a full week.

And whose weeks aren’t full these days?

Because we know saying yes is the easy part; the ‘going’ is where it costs us something. It means committing to showing up and being present.

God’s invitations tend to arrive the same way this dinner text does, in the middle of ordinary days with myriad things going on. They might look like a person who could use a phone call, an old, stubborn disagreement that a loving conversation could solve, or a pew we haven’t sat in for a while.

These invitations sit unanswered in the same place as that text message.

This week’s lesson reminds us that every invitation carries the same intent: someone wants us at the table. 

Someone has already set a place and is hoping to see us in it.

God’s invitations carry it too, and the parable shows how far the wanting goes. When the first guests turn the feast down, the king sends his servants out again, this time to the main roads, because the feast is going ahead and he wants the hall full.

God has set a seat for us this week, as real as the one at the birthday dinner, and it is waiting in the same place as that text, in the phone call we owe and the pew we haven’t sat in for a while. ‘Going’ is how an invitation sitting unanswered becomes time spent with the one who asked for us.

This week’s invitation: If you see yourself in today’s post, find the invite you’ve left hanging and answer it today. Then take a minute to tell God you’re available for whatever he might ask of you this week. Saying yes in small things, and then showing up for them, is how we get ready for the bigger invitation.

God Bless.

FF

When a neighbor lends us a ladder or a good casserole dish, we handle it with more care than we give our own things. It stays somewhere safe, and it goes back cleaner than it came, because it belongs to someone who trusted us with it.

Right?

Sometimes, we get busy though and it goes back later than planned. A week becomes a month, the ladder stays in the garage, and we reach for it whenever a job comes up, until somewhere along the way it stops being the neighbor’s ladder.. Returning it starts to feel awkward, so it stays a little longer, and the longer it stays the more it feels like ours.

If the neighbor finally asks for it, there can be a small sting in handing it over, as though something is being taken from us, even though we both know whose it was.

The tenants in the parable Jesus tells this Sunday are given a vineyard and begin to treat it, and everything it produces, as their own. When the owner’s servants arrive, they meet them as people who have come to take something away rather than return what is not theirs.

I find the story uncomfortable because it describes something that happens gradually, and yet even a tangible thing like a ladder, which should be easy to remember as borrowed because its owner lives down the street, can become ‘unborrowed.’ The things God lends us have no name written on the side, so the hours of our days and the people in our lives begin to feel like ours.

When the dish goes back with something in it, the neighbor knows what that something means, which is thank you. What God has lent us goes back the same way, as a meal on someone’s table, an afternoon given to a friend, or a skill used for the person who needed it, and he receives each one as thanks.

This week’s invitation: Choose one thing God has given you, such as a skill, an hour, or a recipe you’re good at, and put it into someone else’s hands before Sunday. Then tell God it came from him. That is how what we’ve been given reaches other people.

Many of us have said ‘yes’ before we’ve really given the matter thought because the reflexive “sure, I’ll take care of it” costs nothing in the moment.

But later, when the thing still isn’t done, you’re cursing yourself for agreeing to it and dodging the person who asked.

This week’s Gospel speaks to this tendency in us: that easy yes.

When a father asks two sons to work in the vineyard, the first says no outright, then something in him feels embarrassed, and he acquiesces anyway. The second son says yes immediately, which is the easy answer, and then…he simply doesn’t go.

Maybe you’ve not only done this yourself, but have seen this happen around you, or to you, in everyday life. This friction can feel frustrating and disappointing, and it can leave you wondering who you can actually count on.

The Gospel helps us view this scenario through God’s lens:

When Jesus asks which son did his father’s will, the answer is obvious, and it’s made clear to us that the test wasn’t which son sounded more faithful, but which actually did the deed, and even though he initially said ‘no,’ he did it anyway for his father.

Most of us would rather not disappoint friends, family, and co-workers. We want to give the easy yes, along with all its appeal: the peace it buys, the approval it earns, and ideally without the weight of the follow-through.

And in a moment of self-reflection, if we don’t follow through, we rewrite the story so it wasn’t really a promise, just something we said to be kind. We didn’t really mean it.

It is this gap Jesus is naming: saying ‘yes’ and believing is not the work. Does that ‘yes’ and believe make it from our mouth to our hands–and actions?

The mercy in this parable is that the first son gets to change his mind, and his choice to go still counts. His ‘no’ doesn’t follow him into the field because ultimately he did the thing.

So this week, find the yes you’ve been sitting on, whether it’s a promise, an apology, or the small thing you keep putting off, and go do it. Even late, it counts.

God Bless.

FF

There’s a particular sting in watching someone get the same reward you’ve been working toward for years, in a fraction of the time like a neighbor’s garden outproducing yours in its first summer, after five seasons of your own trial and error. 

It doesn’t feel good, and often starts an inner narrative of injustice, which is the same math the workers in this week’s Gospel were doing.

A landowner pays a worker hired an hour before quitting time the exact same wage as the one who’d been in the field since sunrise. The ones who worked longest realize the imbalance doesn’t add up in their favor. The landowner’s response isn’t an apology. Instead he questions whether they’re upset over what they were owed, or over what someone else was given.

This question shows up in variations all the time in our everyday lives.

…A new coworker gets praised for an idea you’d been pitching well before they got there.

…Or a new volunteer gets thanked from the altar the same week you quietly mark ten years of never missing a Sunday.

The sting comes from someone else receiving the same grace on a shorter timeline, rather than you actually being cheated, doesn’t it? The neighbor’s garden didn’t take anything from yours, nor did the coworker’s praise erase the years you’d already put in. Whatever you’ve built is still standing, whether or not someone else gets there faster. 

The fact that someone else got the same thing sooner has nothing to do with what’s actually yours.  

I invite you this week to notice the next time that resentment shows up, and say something genuinely glad, out loud, instead of stewing in mild resentment. Most of us are carrying at least one thing we’re refusing to celebrate (someone else’s garden, someone else’s praise, someone else’s turn). Keeping score of what everyone else got and when, is its own kind of work and nobody’s checking that ledger but you.

God Bless.

FF

We can sometimes feel the weight of an imaginary ledger of injustices. 

…The elevator door closes right as you reach it, and they clearly saw you coming.

…A text you sent to a friend sits unanswered for three days.

…Someone merges in front of you without so much as a wave.

…Your sibling repeats a story back to you—the same story you told them last week.

…Someone at work mentions your idea in a meeting like it was theirs.

…The neighbor’s dog barks every morning at you as you leave your house.

On their own, none are a big deal. They get filed away, one at a time because they’re small enough to shrug off…

But big enough to add up.

It’s the same instinct Peter is working from when he asks Jesus how many times he’s actually required to forgive someone, and offers 7 as a number that already sounds generous to him—he’s still counting, the way we count, keeping some rough sense of what’s owed and what’s been paid. Jesus answers with ‘77,’ and the specific number matters less than what it does to the counting itself: there’s no ledger anymore, because the debt he’s really describing was never something you could tally in the first place, the way a servant in his next story gets forgiven an amount that would take several lifetimes to earn back, only to walk out and grab another man by the collar over what amounts to pocket change.

This is the gap we tend to miss: our debt ‘drawer” we’re keeping is full of real things. Every item, every sting, in it happened to us but none of it is near the size of what’s already been forgiven us long before.

So this week, open the drawer and take out the smallest thing in it and let it go before Sunday because you’ve already been forgiven something bigger. Remember, 77.

God Bless.

FF

People who grade themselves against an internal accountability that they’d never apply to someone they love often don’t realize how much they’re carrying: the running tab of every way they fell short today, every version of the gap between who they are and who they thought they’d be by now. 

You may know it in yourself, or you may be watching someone you love carry it in silence.

Jesus tells a parable about a field where weeds grow up alongside the wheat, and when the workers want to pull the weeds immediately, clean everything up and get it right, the farmer says to let them grow together, because the sorting belongs to the harvest.

The more I’ve sat with this parable, the more I think Jesus is describing something closer to home than the world out there. 

The field is you, or it might be a person you worry about.

My biggest takeaway is something that gets skipped: this farmer’s posture. He already knows what’s growing and that it’s not ideal in that it’s a mix of both weeds and wheat, and he tends the field as it is.

The farmer can afford to wait because he knows what we tend to forget: something is already working in there. Then Jesus adds one more image, yeast already working through the dough long before anything shows on the surface.

Hm. 

This week, whether you’re carrying this yourself or watching someone you love carry it, put down the accounting for a little while and trust that the farmer is already tending the field.

God Bless. 

FF

When faith dissipates, it rarely goes all at once. It gets crowded out, one reasonable compromise at a time, until the space that used to belong to God has been filled by something else, and you can’t name exactly when that became the way things are.

The routine morning prayer getting replaced by phone scrolling is rarely a conscious choice; it’s just the path of least resistance, taken once and then again, until the resistance disappears and so does the prayer. The ambition that fills the calendar leaves no visible wound, but rather steals the hours that used to hold something else.

Jesus names this in the parable of the sower as a specific kind of displacement: the seed that falls among thorns, where worry and the pull of ambition do their work slowly and almost without notice, until what was trying to grow is choked out and has no room left.

Many of us recognize this soil.

A faithful farmer, though, scatters seed everywhere without first evaluating which ground is ready, which means the word is still being offered to the version of us that has let other things move in.

The seed has been scattered. The question is whether we can clear a little space.

This week’s invitation: Name one thing that has been crowding out your faith. Just naming it is the first step, then decide whether it’s worth the space it’s taking and what it’s costing you.

At some point, most people who’ve drifted from their faith community can name the moment it happened, and more often than not, it’s usually about the way someone made them feel on an ordinary Sunday–as opposed to a dissonance in theology. 

Jesus doesn’t let us off the hook on this. To acknowledge him here on earth is to live in a way that makes him visible in the people around us. This shows up most clearly in ordinary moments: when someone we don’t particularly care for gets something wrong, and we have to decide whether to help them anyway or make sure everyone in the room knows who got it right.

The person distributing that judgment rarely saw themselves as pushing anyone away. 

Most of us don’t.

The decision for “un-grace”, made consistently in this less hospitable direction, is part of why pews grow sparse. We tend to look outward for explanations, but the harder question is whether the people who stopped coming were pushed out by the way we–the ones in the pews–treated them.

Faith is what people experience when they’re around us, as much as what we hold privately.

This week’s invitation: Think of one person who’s drifted from the Church. Live your faith well enough this week that, if they were watching, they’d find something worth coming back to.

Most of us will never see the host change. We walk up, receive it, return to our pew, and life continues exactly as it was. 

Nothing looks different. 

This is how Faith is supposed to work most of the time.

But Jesus knew us well enough to know we’d need more sometimes, so at specific moments throughout history, in places he chose, God made the invisible visible. 

The Eucharist became undeniable.

We call these Eucharistic miracles, and they’re exactly what happens at every Mass: bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Christ, except that in these moments, you could see it. Scientists who examined consecrated hosts with no prior knowledge of what they were looking at kept arriving at the same findings across different centuries, different countries, different laboratories: living human cardiac tissue, blood type AB, evidence of physical trauma. The most recent confirmed miracle was in Poland in 2013, which means this isn’t something the Church filed away in the Middle Ages.

Roughly half of Catholics today believe the Eucharist is symbolic, a meaningful remembrance of Christ rather than his living presence. Our Protestant brothers and sisters hold that same belief sincerely, and we respect that. 

However, it isn’t what Jesus said. 

Before he ascended, he promised to remain with us until the end of time, and the Eucharist is where he kept that promise. Every Mass, every communion, he is here.

The miracles don’t create that faith. They confirm what was always true.

This week: If you’ve ever wondered to yourself whether it’s really him in that host, search the internet for “Eucharistic miracles Vatican” and you’ll find the Vatican’s official page wi: the full list of miracles, the locations, the dates, and the scientific findings behind each one. 

Start with one story and see what happens.

God Bless. 

FF