Top of the morning to you all!
A few weeks or perhaps a month back a friend of mine suggested that I write to the Pope about the ministry that I am doing!
While at the time I didn’t feel to do it, yesterday my writer’s block got undone and I did it!!
Only afterwards did I discover that Toni is already good friends with Francis!
😂😂😂😂😂
As I looked on Google for the address I was disappointed to find a website giving out the Pope’s address to everyone so that they could write to him and complain!!
The poor man I thought, receiving all that hate mail from the ‘faithful’!
And so I moved in the opposite spirit and I sent him a nice card!!!
I wrote him a little note about what we are doing in London and thanked him for his wonderful example of being human and merciful!
Whether he’ll ever get it I don’t know but I have heard of him replying to people and even ringing them up so who knows!!
However what I took from this is how we should and must encourage our priests and pope and eachother. We are often far too quick to complain about the negatives!
At times I think that we should have 2 confession boxes in our catholic churches, the first one to tell the priest our sins and tonget forgiveness and the second one to tell the priest all the good things we did and to get encouragement and a big hug!!!
God is love, not sin and focusing too much on sins is a terrible mistake!
Of course many focus on neither God nor sin and this is an even worse mistake. As a friend said recently:
“God loves a trier, God hates a chancer”
And as today is Friday, a day we often pray and fast, let us give thought also to encouragement and not just moaning and groaning about the end of the world and the spread of the coronavirus!
The Holy Spirit is not a spirit of doom and gloom and fear. Conviction and truth, yes! Love and mercy, yes! But doom and gloom, NO!!
Today, let’s refocus a bit. Let’s pray for the thousands of people dying of hunger every day that perhaps we never give a second thought to! Let’s think of all those people sick in hospital that maybe we never think of and now let us put this into perspective with the Coronavirus.
Do we only pray when it affects us?
Are we only concerned when our lives are in danger?
Are we really so selfish and self-focused?!
And so today as the world worries and we pray are we also able to repent and pray:
“Lord protect me from this virus, heal those who have it and going forward I will dedicate some of my time to helping others”
Or do we simply pray:
“Protect me Lord and my family. I don’t want my kids missing out on school or to miss my holiday”
Personally I think Pope Francis does a wonderful job of calling us back to the basics and to being Christians every day rather than just when it suits us!
So today let’s pray for our Pope, pray for priests and not let our hope and trust in Jesus be swept away by doom and gloom!
Prayer moves mountains, it can move viruses too 🙏🙏😉😉😂
Michael