Giving Without Fear
The photo above captures a favorite memory from our recent trip to NPH in El Salvador. We were able to take several of the kids out for lunch and fun at a volcanic lake in El Salvador. This is a picture of Edgar in midair, leaping with no fear into the beautiful waters below. It took me about an hour of watching the kids leap from the high railing of the dock before I was willing to do so myself. Sometimes this is how many of us approach the Christian life as well. We want desperately to give ourselves totally to God, but we are afraid of what that might mean in reality. The desire to do good is present, but there is also the lingering fear of what that might ultimately mean for our life.
One of the challenges I have proposed for St. Thomas Parish as we enter together into an Advent Conspiracy is to worship fully, not by the volume of prayer, not by the length of prayer, but by offering our life itself as a prayer each week. The challenge, and it is a difficult one, is to come each Sunday ready to place our lives on the altar as an offering to God.
In his book, Of Water and the Spirit, Fr. Alexander Schmemann puts it this way,
The calling is to sanctify and to transform ourselves and our lives, as well as the world given to each of us as our kingdom: Ourselves–by constantly offering our life, our work, our joys as well as our sufferings to God; by making them always open to God’s will and grace; by being that which we have become in Christ, the Temple of the Holy Spirit; by transforming our life inot that which the Holy Spirit has made it: a “liturgy,” a service to God and communion with Him. The World–by being truly “men for the others,” not in the sense of constant involvement in social or political affairs, to which one so often reduces Christianity today, but by being always, everywhere and in all things witnesses to Christ’s Truth, which is the only true life, and bearers of the sacrificial love which is the ultimate essence and content of man’s priesthood.
Let us strive always to be people of true sacrifice, living as people who are intent on living the Gospel without fear. Let us give ourselves away in the same way that Christ gave Himself away for us.
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