Blue Heron at the Scarborough Marsh Picture by Gail Prince
I do not seek my own will but the will of the One who sent me, Jn 5
Our Blog is Inspired by The Holy Spirit.
“Amen, amen, I say to you, the Son cannot do anything on his own,
but only what he sees the Father doing;
for what he does, the Son will do also.
For the Father loves the Son
and shows him everything that he himself does, Jn 5
When I was younger I had a hard time understanding how Jesus didn’t commit a sin.
The above quote from John’s Gospel explains this very concisely. If I only did as God the Father showed me I also wouldn’t have sinned.
But I didn’t!
I took advantage of the free will that God gave me, to do my will, not God’s, who I was led to believe by satan, that doing God’s will would only lead me to live a very boring life.
In fact, I just finished reading When Christ Comes: The Beginning of the Very Best by Max Lucado, and Max said that God is so Loving that God will allow us to find our own way to God and risk losing us to satan. This is how much freedom we have.
Our Parents didn’t do this. If we screwed up we were punished!
Now I also believe when we don’t do the will of God we are punished but the punishment is loss of Love, Joy, and Peace, and if we never knew about Love, Joy, and Peace, we in fact were not punished as I believed for way too long in my, not our, life.
Every day we have a choice to make, do the will of God the Father, and imitate His Son, or go our own way.
Two thousand years ago the above quote from Jesus is even more radical.
Imagine the shock the Jewish people had when they were told that Jesus was the Son of God, that Jesus had a Father, and that God, Jesus was human. Up until this point, the Jewish God was One God one Spirit, who appeared as smoke on Mt. Sinai, and at the dedication of the Temple, and God’s name was,
I Am!
God had asked the Jewish nation to keep His commandments, which they didn’t do, and I was very similar to the Jewish people in my younger years.
I did do God’s will when it fit into my needs and objectives, but if God’s will didn’t fit my needs and objectives I threw God under the bus and went my own way.
Don’t think for a minute there isn’t a price that has to be paid.
There is,
Once again my problem was I didn’t know about Joy and Peace, so you can’t lose what you don’t know and understand.
This started to change one Lent in 1980 when I said I would go to Mass every day during Lent. I believed this would be easy to do, and yes, I would stop going to Mass after lent ended.
We, Gail and I, had just started our Insurance agency, F.A. Prince CLU, and for the first seven months, I didn’t sell a thing.
Have you ever worked fifty to sixty hours a week and not been paid, even worse we were going through our savings and investments.
I was terrified we would go belly up.
This is the backdrop to my going to Mass during Lent. I felt maybe God would help me get some, any, business just to start paying the bills.
You know, give a little, get a little.
What God did do was introduce me to the Peace of the Holy Spirit. I went to communion and as I walked back to my seat, I noticed after a few days, I was at Peace, but the Peace only lasted ten to fifteen seconds. After a few weeks, I asked myself, how can I be at Peace when my world financially is falling apart?
This question was really a two-part question:
1. Why after ten to fifteen seconds did the Peace end?
2. How do I grow in Peace?
The answer of course was, I allowed satan back into my life to remind me of our financial difficulties, and threw God under the bus to try and figure out how I, not we, could solve my, not our, difficulty.
I grudgingly came to the answer that I had to turn my life over to God.
Which I started to do.
We started to make sales and we ended the first year with an eighty percent loss of income from the previous year. How we didn’t go belly up I’ll never know. I do know Gail handled the personal finances and did a fantastic job, and she never once busted my chops about our financial situation.
As I type this I also know this brought Gail and me much closer, strange isn’t it, it’s the hard times that can bring you closer to your spouse, kids, and most importantly God.
The kids were interesting also because I was their dad and they knew I would provide for them as I had always provided for them, and they kept living their lives as though everything was the same as it was before we started our company.
I really appreciated this.
They didn’t judge me, they just loved mom and dad.
I did turn my life over to God but as sales increased I threw God under the bus again and said I, not we, could do it on my own.
This pattern would continue for the rest of my business career. Get in trouble, ask God to take over, get the business going again, throw God under the bus and do it my way.
Unlike St. Paul who did a one-hundred and eighty-degree turn in his life after he met Jesus, I did a gradual turn over the years until that November night in the year two thousand when the Holy Spirit and I wrestled for five hours and I finally agreed to do the will of my Father, imitating His Son, by listening to the whisper of the Holy Spirit.
I felt that night I had lost my freedom and didn’t look forward to what God would ask of me, and everything I feared God would ask of me, God did!
But I didn’t have a choice, I had lost the fight!
And now I know and embrace Love, Joy, and Peace so I do have a choice and every day I now strive to not seek my own will but the will of the God who loves me, and life is SOOOOOOOO much better.
“The nine” We pray you will grow in the Love, Joy, and Peace of the Holy Spirit by growing in Patience, Kindness, Generosity, Faithfulness, Gentleness, and Self-Control.
Sidebar:
This Lent we decided to read the Catholic Catechism for Adults.
This has been very interesting for me, and I must admit makes me very sad.
Why, some of you might be thinking?
Here we are, people, who believe in a God, Father, who sent His Son, Jesus, to climb up upon a Cross taking on all our sins, so that we might be justified to the Father, and the book I’m reading is written by lawyers or Theologians who can’t seem to fill the pages with Joy.
A couple of examples because I am only halfway through the book:
When they talked about the Eucharist, they never mentioned we are touching God, Jesus, and when you touch Jesus the healing process begins if you have faith.
We have testified to this in previous Blogs.
No other religion can say this, only Catholics, some Orthodox, and some Protestant Churches.
For the people in those churches who do believe Jesus is fully present in the Eucharist, do they really understand how special a relationship we have with God?
If they read the Catechism they won’t.
Next,
The Catechism defined The Fruits, no, sorry, Paul said in Galatians chapter 5 the Fruit of the Holy Spirit, the Catechism defined the Fruits as Charity, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Generosity, Gentleness, Faithfulness, Modesty, Self-Control, Chastity.
Paul said: the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Galatians 5: 22-23 (NABRE)
I did check other bibles, I have a web page that makes this very easy, there were changes for example Long Suffering in place of Patience,
But,
Love was always first.
Love was never mentioned in the Catholic Catechism as a Fruit of the Holy Spirit.
Love is the greatest Gift from God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Love was clearly shown by His Life and most importantly the death of Jesus on the Cross.
The Catechism changed Love to Charity when defining the Fruit of the Holy Spirit.
Charity is VERY important but it is a subset of Love.
Always remember Jesus died, took on our sins, and said “Father forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.”
I thought about changing Love to Charity, and came to the conclusion that the people who wrote the Catechism didn’t know how to grow in the Fruit of the Holy Spirit, as I didn’t before the Holy Spirit said to me after I had read about the Fruit of the Holy Spirit, “Would you like more Peace?” I said, “Yes,” the Holy Spirit then said, “Pray for an increase of Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Generosity, Faithfulness, Gentleness and Self-control.”
I did!
My life, as did the lives of many of the men in the Cumberland County Jail, changed!
It was in the Jail that The Holy Spirit taught me that growth in the last six Fruit increases my Love, Joy, and Peace.
We should be a very joyful people, we have The Holy Spirit infused in our souls at Baptism, the Jewish people had the Temple in Jerusalem, we are walking temples, we know when we die Jesus will justify us if we forgive everyone who has screwed us over, and we acknowledge Jesus as our Lord and Savior, and we know the God we worship is a God of Outrageous Love, who has, is, and will take care of us.
We should be celebrating our good fortune, that our faith was passed on to us by many generations of Catholics who lived before us, or if we are new to the Catholic Church that we listened to the whisper of the Holy Spirit and joined this wonderful religion, and in celebrating we become a light that shines brightly in a very dark world.
