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Tuesday, Third Week of Lent B (March 9/2021)
Your Daily Blessing: May God's grace breakthrough your selfishness. Amen!
Read Dan 3:25-43; Matt 18:21-35; pray Psalm 25[24].
NARRATION: Any day I come to the decision that I must reach out in love and forgiveness to anyone that I have any reason to believe we have frosty relationship is a blessed day. Why? Because grace has won!
Our entire life here below is a school of virtue. We pass or fail each passing day. If we keep failing day after day, it is only a matter of time before one drops out of school.
Our greatest enemy is the self: and if we are to locate what is the chief culprit in our long list of vices, what would it be? I will simply identify ‘selfishness’ as a vice that you find at the root of all the seven capital sins (vices: pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust).
I am proposing another approach to an old problem. Though pride and greed still retain their unenviable position, but ‘selfishness’ permeates all seven vices!
So if we ‘intentionally’ aim at eliminating ‘selfishness’ in all our actions, starting with our desires and thinking processes (intentions), we might touch on something that triggers a chain response – a breakthrough from our vices! Why? Because selfishness blocks grace better than how bad fat blocks our arteries!
In the first reading Daniel fasted and prayed for God’s mercy on his people (as against our piety that is over concentrated on personal wants/needs). And in the Gospel, we see the steward who pleaded for mercy and received an extraordinary pardon but blinded by selfishness not to see that he was pardoned so much so that he might show the same kindness to others.
God is using every life situation to bring out the best in us, but our selfishness gets in the way all the time! Ironically, we often think we are being ‘smart’ when in fact we are digging our own graves. God’s plan is that we grow to the “full stature of Christ” as our ultimate blessing.
So each time he calls us to “come higher!” on the ladder of holiness. Hence, our real ‘breakthrough’ is when we finally resist that “spoilt child” in us crying for this or that (a big distraction!) and focus on the bigger picture in everything! Pray for this breakthrough this lent.
PRAYER: O Lord, my vision is so small I can hardly see the bigger picture! I therefore find it hard to forgive hurts even when I know how much you have forgiven me! Heal my selfishness Lord. Amen!
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