Make your life a mission – not an intermission

“Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ." -Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Gospel text (Mk 16,15-18):
Jesus appeared to the Eleven and said to them:
"Go into the whole world
and proclaim the Gospel to every creature.
Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved;
whoever does not believe will be condemned.
These signs will accompany those who believe:
in my name they will drive out demons,
they will speak new languages.
They will pick up serpents with their hands,
and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them.
They will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover."

So how are those New Year’s Resolutions coming? What’s that? You don’t eat healthier, weigh less, exercise more, and rise earlier to pray (or some variation of self-improvement)? Well, take heart. All conversions are not quick and complete the way that we think of St. Paul’s.

Paul lived at the time of Jesus but as far as we know they never met. Paul was first called Saul. As a young man, he was a very bright student of the Hebrew religion. When he grew older, he persecuted the early Christians.

In the Bible's Acts of the Apostles, we read about Saul's amazing conversion (chapters 9, 22, 26). What happened? One day, Paul was on his way to the city of Damascus to hunt down more Christians. Suddenly, a great light shone all around him. As he fell to the ground blind, he heard a voice say, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" Saul answered, "Who are you, Sir?" And the voice said, "I am Jesus, the one you are persecuting." Saul was shocked and confused. After a few seconds, he asked, "What do you want me to do?" Jesus told him to continue on to Damascus and there he would be told what to do.

Today the world knows Saul by his Roman name of Paul. He is called "the apostle." He traveled all over the world, preaching the Good News. He led countless people to Jesus. He worked and suffered. His enemies tried to kill him several times. Yet nothing could stop him. When he was old and tired, he was once again put in prison and sentenced to die. Still St. Paul was happy to suffer and even die for Christ.

I am grateful for Paul’s model of a 180 degree but unfortunately, that just doesn’t happen to be many people’s primary experience of how God works in their lives.
With that being said, read the wisdom of a wonderful Jesuit, who died in 1955, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability--and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually--let them grow,
Let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don't try to force them on, as though you could be today
what time will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
-Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. from The Making of the Mind

Let this year be a year of conversions. Have the courage