Hope, Healing, and Holy Week

And now, as I say that, I feel it’s so special and I’ve really been looking forward to this week. I want to just lift up all of you parents with little children ’cause I feel like when you have little children you don’t get to enjoy it in the same way. It doesn’t feel as slow and I feel like I have one toe in that land still, but we’re mostly out of it. This will be the first year that we take all six kids to all three masses, Thursday, Friday, and then Easter vigil. And normally, my husband and I we’ll split. One of us we’ll do Thursday with the older kids. And one of us we’ll do Friday with the older kids. But this year, we’re like, let’s do it let’s take them.

And our evening services Thursday and Friday are at six, which is still a pretty rough time for the boys. And so I know that it’s going to be challenging. I know that they will be wiggly, they will be whiny, they will be tired, they won’t understand where we’re going in the evening, it will be long, I know that we will go and go through and kiss the cross and then they’ll be like, we have to do it again. My five-year-old, last time we went to mass it had been like three minutes and he was like, is it almost done yet? I was like, no, it’s not almost done.

And so, you know, obviously it is a little less enjoyable when you are wrangling a bunch of little children, but even knowing that we have these rhythms in our church, I think can be so special and endearing to us as Catholics. And God sees, God sees you showing up. He knows the intentions of your heart. And I think he loves watching us chase around after little kids. I think he smiles when we’re all wrangling our kids with palms on Palm Sunday, like don’t, don’t hit her. You know, it’s quite an intense experience to do holy week with kids. But, I think it’s so beautiful. And as somebody who, you know, wasn’t raised with a religion and was Protestant for a few years before being Catholic. This is just something so special to the Catholic faith.

And it feels so right; it feels right that holy week is difficult. And then we walk this story with Jesus every year. And so this year I want you, especially to be thinking about healing. I was reading a book that said that most communication issues in relationships and really most relationship issues in general are the result of some form of you not having unconditional love for yourself and that the more that you unconditionally love yourself, you just kind of become full of love and then love spills out into other relationships.

And I’m not saying that that means that the people in your life don’t have responsibility for their part in your relationship, but it felt really true to me that probably a lot of our woundedness, Makes us sensitive or prickly in relationships. And then we’re struggling to have a healthy relationship with someone when really we can turn around and experience our own healing with our own selves. I think Holy Week is a really good time to make peace with the past. I recently got to see the passion play. And I realized I had seen live stations of the cross many, many times, but I had not seen the passion play acted out and it’s slightly different scenes.

And it was really beautiful and it was really moving. And one of the things that was interesting to me was watching the disciples be so surprised when Jesus said, you know, someone will betray me and this is my last night with you. And he kind of tells them if some of these things that are to come and they’re just a ghast they’re like what? What do you mean? And of course Peter’s like, Lord, I would never betray you. I’d give my life for you.

And then like immediately, it’s so fast for us immediately he’s, you know, being crucified and they’re all gone except for John, they all left and there’s Peter being like Jesus, who, I don’t even know what you’re talking about. The juxtaposition of those two things is so powerful to me. And I think of course God in his goodness shows the story like that because he knows that that’s how we are going to be with him. Right? I mean, how many of us set out our Lenten intentions. And said, Lord, I’m going to do this for you. I’m going to give up this, or I’m going to add in this many things. And then we struggle to do it seemingly little things are basic things. Things much smaller than crucifixion.

But instead of spending time feeling bad about that, I want you just to run to Jesus. I want you to throw yourself in his arms, like a child and say, have mercy on me. And I love how beautiful it describes Peter when Peter notices, when Peter knows it’s the Lord and he jumps out of the boat and he runs up to him. Oh, it’s just, it’s so powerful and he had just done, like the worst thing he had just went from I love you so much I’d lay my life down for you. And then things get rough he pieces out, denies him three times. And then I was like, well, I guess I should go be a fisherman.

And if Jesus can forgive that and hold Peter and give him such a beautiful calling and say, take care of my sheep he can forgive us for whatever we did over lent or didn’t do. And I think asking for God’s mercy and asking for healing in lent can be an echo of asking for healing and mercy for anything in our past. Purchasing, you know what Lord forgive me. Forgive me for all these different phases of my life for all these moments that I chose the world instead of you. Let us make peace with it. Let us make peace with our past and learn to love ourselves unconditionally. And I think that it’s probably difficult to do. I could take some time to learn how to love ourselves unconditionally.

But we can start this week, we can start this week. It’s not even that difficult. If you just ask yourself, what are some negative memories that you have from your childhood? Bring them up. And then have God show you the truth. Because usually it’ll be something like, you know, a teacher that was really hard on you or our parents who had really high standards, or maybe parents who weren’t even there, maybe, you know, a sibling that was a really mean to you, maybe a sibling that really struggled, and that sibling got most of your parents’ attention. Like, you know, there’s so many different things that happened to us. And then from those moments, we just label ourselves. We create a story in our mind, right? One of mine was definitely like Sterling talks too much.

I had a lot of too much in my life. And healing for something like that looks like bringing it all to the Lord and God saying you are just enough. You are enough. You don’t need to be less, you don’t need to be more. You are enough and I love you. Follow me, take up your cross, care for my sheep; He is just there ready to give us mercy every time we ask for it. And I want you to have hope that your life probably feels bad. Because you have not healed some things from your past, and you’re just continuing to tell yourself things that aren’t true. And what I love about Peter is as fickle as his heart is to leave Jesus. He is as fickle in a different way to go all in again on Jesus.

He just says, I love you. Yes, Lord, I love you. I’m all in what would it take for you to do that again today to just so, yes, Lord, forgive me for all that junk, clean slate. You are a new creation today. I love you, Lord, I am your servant. How can I serve you? And just believing that you are enough and that God gives you everything that you need for today. And anytime you start feeling scared it’s most likely that you’re replaying tapes from the past or you’re making up stories about the future.

And I’m really paying attention to my mind lately as I sit and even have a conversation with my husband and I can feel in my body that there will start to be some sort of tension. And I notice it’s because I have started thinking about the past or the future. And then if I actually stay in the moment and I feel like it makes me roll my eyes a little bit when everyone’s like, just be present in the moment. I don’t know something about that doesn’t really resonate with me, but I’m paying attention to when I am in the moment. And I think about my life today, I have everything that I need and I’m doing okay. But I tend to feel upset or scared or wounded when I think about hurtful things from the past, or I project hurtful things or scary things in the future. And so I think it’s really interesting that we see how easy it is for us to choose the Lord and then to walk away and choose the world but baked right into holy week, is that very story?

And then everybody, but John broke bread with Jesus and watched him do many miracles. They watched him do it over the years. They were with him and then left as soon as it got hard but all we have to do is have the humility to come back and say, Lord have mercy. And then we are made new. And then we can immediately start doing the work of the Lord and that’s what we all want really. That’s the most fulfilling thing that we can do with our lives is to do the work of the Lord. And so I want you to put it on your calendar that the divine mercy novena starts on Good Friday. There have been some years, no joke, with as specialist divine mercy is to me. And as much as I love fostering a diary, I forget to start the divine mercy novena on Good Friday. So I’m just telling everyone not to forget to start on good Friday, read about it. It’s just so beautiful, it’s so powerful, and then pray to the Lord on divine mercy Sunday, ask for something big, ask for a miracle, ask for healing, ask for the salvation of sinners, ask for mercy for everything you’ve done, ask for wisdom, ask for the Lord to guide you to sainthood. I just want the most powerful promises that we have from the Lord. The power of divine mercy and the just incredible pouring out of extra graces on divine mercy Sunday.

I think this world could use some grace right now. I think our families could use some grace. I think our bodies could use some grace. And so I want you to find hope in the passion story; they were just regular people, there were regular people who said, I love you with all my whole heart. Jesus. And then they went, oh, I got busy, I changed my mind. It was hard whenever you had made peace with it. Ask for healing and have hope that God will have mercy on you and welcome you with open arms. And say my daughter welcome, let us begin. We have a good work to do. And that he just has worked for you to do. We know because you’re alive and if you’re staying home with babies and not going to Thursday or Friday service, We’re not going to Easter vigil and going on Easter Sunday, that might be your tradition in your family. Just know that God meets you where you’re at. He meets you where you’re at and whatever you offer him He accepts it and he says, thank you daughter. He doesn’t look at you and he goes, that’s not really good enough, try again. Like he’s such a good and gracious father and he loves us so much. And so I want you to go into holy week and expect healing and expect hope.

Not just hope in the resurrection of Christ and the idea that we can have our sins forgiven and go to heaven. That is obviously the good news and the gospel story. I want you to have hope that God can give you healing now, and that you can have less pain in your life. Starting now, it doesn’t have to be this hard, you don’t have to feel so much guilt that you don’t have to feel the pain of wounds, past wounds, knowing that you; chasing you. You don’t have to feel your to-do list clawing at you. You don’t have to feel like you’re letting everyone down. It’s just not how God wants us to live.

He wants us to pledge ourselves to him. And then to notice when we fell down and to come right back to him and say, Lord, have mercy. Now, what will you have me do? And then we do whatever he tells us. And if we wake up in the morning and say, I’m going to fast today and by 10:30, or like, I couldn’t make it now we’re eating a late breakfast. That we say, Lord have mercy I didn’t have enough strength for that today, have mercy on me. And he says, daughter, I do. And then you say, now, what work are we doing today? Lord? And this is not. Not a way to game the system and get out of working hard, I don’t know any moms who don’t work hard, we all want to please the Lord, we all want to be saints.

We are trying and we are doing so much good work. But we do fall, and Jesus is right there to meet us and say, I have mercy for you, right now. So let us soak up this holy week for the special time that it is. Let us pray The Divine Mercy Chaplet starting on Good Friday, ending on Divine Mercy Sunday, you can go to praymorenovena.com to find one, but you can also just type in divine mercy Chaplet and see it all over the place. Read about it, read about the promises that Christ has made for that particular novena. Take it seriously and expect great things from the Lord. That’s one of the things he says often to Faustina’s, he says it just makes me sad that people don’t expect great things or ask me for great things. And I think it’s because so many of us have not healed the pain of our past. We carry shame with us, we think we are bad. We think we are the things that people told us and then, we continued to tell ourselves. But let us ask the Lord for healing. Let us believe that he will bring it. Let us go forward and purpose, not to live in the past and not to project the future. But to know that we have everything that we need today. And as quickly as we noticed that we had fallen, maybe just as quickly as for mercy. And then believe that we have received it and move on, so simple. That is what holy week is about. It’s remembering that he died for our sins so that we can have this endless mercy. Did we get to participate in the passion? every time we ask for forgiveness. So profound.

All right. My friends, I’m praying for you. Please pray for me. Thank you so much for listening and have a blessed day.