Soul Scribe

Life hits rough patches for all of us.

When the road turns rough, faith is crucial.  It’s also doubly hard.  When so many things are up in the air, it’s hard to leave things in God’s hand.

Someone reminded me recently of what I already know.  He said “no problem is too great for God.”

Sometimes, you need to hear things you already know.  It keeps you on the path.

And it reminds you that despite all the roughness, there are still bright moments to cherish.

Time is a transient thing.  It slips by quickly unnoticed until days, weeks, months have melted away.

Time in a crisis is even more fleeting.

I find myself starting again in more ways than one.  But isn’t that what life and faith are all about?  A journey of stops and starts, speed bumps and long stretches?

No one is really happy merely because he has what he wants, but only if he wants things he ought to want.

St. Augustine

Man is what he believes. 

Anton Chekhov 

And for us this is the end of all the stories.  All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on Earth has read…in which every chapter is better than the one before.

C. S. Lewis
The Last Battle,
Chronicles of Narnia

Broken things are precious. We eat broken bread because we share in the death of our Lord and his broken life. Broken flowers give perfume. Broken incense is used in adoration. A broken ship saved Paul and many other passengers on the way to Rome. Sometimes the only way the good Lord can get into some hearts is to break them.

Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

God calls us to lead lives of holiness.  Jesus gave the most perfect example with his own life.  But he gave us other examples of holiness in his own mother, the Virgin Mary, and the saints.

Saints are people to whom we can relate, essentially role models for the faithful.  Saints do not forget those of us on Earth.  They follow Jesus’ commandment to “love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matthew 22:39) even after death.  In following this, saints pray intensely for those of us on Earth.  And thank goodness, because we really need it!

While we ask saints for help, it is by God that our prayers are answered.  Saints help us at the request of Jesus and through God’s power.  When you pray to a saint, you’re not worshiping that saint.  You’re asking for the saint to pray for you and ask God to help you.

God is the one acting in our lives, not the saints.  They’re just the messengers showing us the way to reach the Lord.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers —

That perches in the soul —

And sings the tune without the words —

And never stops — at all —

Emily Dickinson

Stand by the roads and look, ask for the ancient path, which is the way to good.  Walk on it and find rest for your soul.

Jeremiah 6:16

Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.

H. Jackson Brown, Jr.