Good News Reflection Tuesday of the 8th Week in Ordinary Time March 4, 2014 Today’s Readings: 1 Peter 1:10-16 Psalm 98:1-4 Mark 10:28-31 What is God asking you to give up? In the Gospel reading today, Jesus says, There is no one who has given up home, brothers or sisters, mother or father, children or property, for me and for the Gospel who will not receive in this present age a hundred times more.... Do you believe that God is more generous than you could ever be? As Christians, whenever we hold back from being generous, its probably because were afraid that God is not going to be generous to us. I know. I’ve wrestled with this myself. In August of 2009 when I hired Michael Jones to be my Ministry Assistant, I was both excited about it and nervous. In my heart, I knew I could trust God to keep providing the extra funding this would require. But would more donors be willing to serve God by helping me with this added expense? The following December, during our annual fundraising appeal, one of my readers offered to completely sponsor Michael’s salary. Praise the Lord! And the lesson keeps growing: Since then the staff has multiplied and God has continued to provide support for personnel and for office space through the generosity of readers who believe in the difference we are making for the Kingdom of God. Does this mean it’s become easy for me to trust God? Not at all! God keeps stretching me. This year, it’s necessary to trust God more blindly. I have had to contract a web developer or else Good News Ministries will have passed its prime: In 2013, our outreach and our effectiveness severely declined because our website coding is outdated. And the extra funding needed to serve God to our best ability has not yet arrived! What distrust or worry has God asked you to give up? Perhaps youre going to move to a new place and youll have to leave behind family and friends. Perhaps you have children who are flying from the nest – or returning back to the nest you’ve enjoyed having empty. Perhaps God wants you to give up certain acquaintances because theyre infecting you with worldliness and immorality. Perhaps you see needs around you that you could do something about if only you could feel okay about letting go of some of your time or money. Perhaps youre being asked to give up a cherished ministry. All letting go is hard. The root reason is this: Were afraid that God wont replace what we lose, yet he wants to give us even more! Or else were insisting that we get back what weve lost, while God wants us to fill that hole with new, different blessings. I began to learn this in the early 1980s when I was the leader of a prayer group and the editor of the monthly Charismatic Renewal newsletter for my diocese. God wanted me to give up both ministries so that I could take better care of myself during my second pregnancy, but that didnt make sense, because no one else in the prayer group was willing to lead and no one at the newsletter had the editorial skills that I had. After weeks of refusing to believe that God really did want me to quit, I noticed that the problems created by my NOT quitting were getting larger. I decided to trust Gods advice. As a result, my new-found free time evolved into writing articles that were published in Christian magazines. Just as Id expected, the prayer group fell apart, but something new and better grew up in its place. And God sent a new editor to the newsletter who did a better job than I had done. We need Spirit-filled discernment to identify what God wants us to give up when its time to let go of it. Then we must trust Jesus as we accept the changes. Such trust always rewards us with new adventures, new paths, new friends, new ministries, and new blessings that are a hundred times better than what weve given up. Subscribe to receive the Good News Reflections, like this one, daily by email! gogoodnews.net/cgi-bin/subscriptions/mail.cgi/list/eastdr/ © 2014 by Terry A. Modica, Good News Ministries, gnm.org. Used by permission.
Posted on: Tue, 04 Mar 2014 07:21:15 +0000
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