“Great opportunities to help others seldom come, but small ones surround us daily.”

"There are no borders, no limits: He sends us to everyone. … Do not be afraid to go and to bring Christ into every area of life, to the fringes of society, even to those who seem farthest away, most indifferent.” – Pope Francis

Scripture Text: (1 THES 2:9-13)
You recall, brothers and sisters, our toil and drudgery.
Working night and day in order not to burden any of you,
we proclaimed to you the Gospel of God.
You are witnesses, and so is God,
how devoutly and justly and blamelessly
we behaved toward you believers.
As you know, we treated each one of you as a father treats his children,
exhorting and encouraging you and insisting
that you walk in a manner worthy of the God
who calls you into his Kingdom and glory.

And for this reason we too give thanks to God unceasingly,
that, in receiving the word of God from hearing us,
you received it not as the word of men, but as it truly is, the word of God,
which is now at work in you who believe

For a sinner the greatest thing about the Lord Jesus is that He identified Himself and revealed Himself to the lost.

St Augustine, whose feast day the Church celebrates today stated most eloquently, “You called, shouted, broke through my deafness; you flared, blazed, banished my blindness; you lavished your fragrance, I gasped; and now I pant for you; I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst; you touched me, and I burned for your peace."

The world today needs people who are in love with God, or rather witnesses who reveal themselves as disciples whom Jesus loves. The only thing that can break through the complexity and the confusion of the people of our time is the simple and holy Love of God.

Ever try teaching chastity to a teen, correcting a person who is hurting many, or consoling a person who is suffering in the wake of immeasurable loss? Without the love of God, these things are impossible or perhaps even futile. It is only the Spirit of the living God that lives and sings in the hearts of disciples that can ignite this fire in others.

There is great need for apostles of our age to be on fire with this love, to first burn brightly with it and then share it like fire that catches others. But first we must understand something very important, this “unquenchable love” does not below to us, it belongs to God alone. You can not manufacture it no matter who you are, how smart you are, or how privileged you are. In order to acquire it, we must empty ourselves, so we can be filled by it. There is no other way.

John the Baptist put it like this, “He must increase and I must decrease” (John 3:30). Two thousand years later, Mother Teresa also taught the same thing when she said, “When you look at the inner workings of electrical things, you see wires. Until the current passes through them, there will be no light. That wire is you and me. The current is God. We have the power to let the current pass through us, use us, to produce the light of the world, Jesus, in us. Or we can refuse to be used and allow darkness to spread.”

But in the final analysis, no matter how we respond to him, God never stops loving us and continues to call us out of the tombs we have constructed for ourselves! Whenever we turn to him, he gives us the courage to search our hearts, the humility to confess our sins, and the grace to take another step into the light of Christ. As we do, he doesn’t only help us to shed our sins—he makes us into the very “aroma of Christ,” spreading “the odor of the knowledge of him” everywhere we go (2 Corinthians 2:14-15).