Run to the Lord

And so if you are struggling financially, you might be thinking about getting a job or a second job. If you are struggling with a relationship with one of your extended family members, you might be looking at books or podcasts, about toxic relationships or setting boundaries. We’re always Googling things about kids. We, our natural instinct is to kind of go outside of ourselves to the world to solve whatever it is that we’re dealing with and that’s necessary sometimes. But I wanted to talk today about making our knee jerk reaction our first line of defense to be running to the Lord, flying to his sacred heart. I really picture myself like squeezing a cartoon heart, like running to him and squeezing a cartoon heart. She’s been like, Lord help me, Jesus save me.

What do you think? What do you want me to do? And it’s amazing how often I, when I remember to do this confined peace and rest in the heart of Jesus and from that place, I’m such a better problem solver. I’m coming up with much better and wholly your ideas to tackle what’s going on with me. The other thing that also happens when I run to the heart of Jesus is the stakes of whatever I’m dealing with feeling lower, he just feels lower. So on the daily podcast for me, I’m going through searching for and maintaining peace. just kind of a couple of pages a day and sharing the wisdom from that book but every time I go through it, I’m just struck with this idea that he says that there are no good reasons for us to lose our peace.

And just kind of throughout the book over and over again, he’s like, listen God has got this, you’re fine. That thing and he goes through many different examples, whatever that is God’s got it, you’re fine. So much of our unhappiness comes from not having confidence in the Lord and let’s explore that. Why do we lack confidence in the Lord? I think intellectually, we know that he is good and then he’s all powerful. He’s outside of time, he sees everything; he’s kind of designed this life for us so we have freewill and yet we really hold ourselves back from completely trusting him or if you’re like me I have these grand moments where I’m like, I give you everything, Lord, I completely trust you and then an hour later, 10 hours later, I can feel myself kind of yanking it back. Okay, but I’ll take care of this one; I’ll take care of this part of my life, I’ll do it.

That kind of ungodly self-reliance that we fall into so easily and so I just want to encourage you to run to the heart of the Lord right now. Forgive me, Lord, for trying to do your job. I give it all back to you, you’ve got this. Everything that we’re going through is part of our Sainthood story. And some of you maybe going through difficult things and I want you to think about it like a movie or watching a movie and the main character is, you know, going through that adversity or climbing that mountain and going through something difficult we’re with them, we’re cheering them on and because we’re watching a movie, we know, that it’s going to end up okay.

Certainly for children’s movies. I always tell that the kids I’m like you guys, this is a kid’s movie like what do you think is going to happen? Well, they’re probably gonna make their way back home and everyone will be fine. Yeah, but if we look at our life like that our God is trying to get us to heaven. If heaven is the punchline and this is the scary part of the movie, if we knew that if we knew how it was going to end up, we would just be like, oh, this is an intense part, but the character is going to be fine. And I want you to know that you have control over you as the character ends up fine, because salvation is a matter of asking for forgiveness and believing that Jesus Christ was the son of God who came into the world for the forgiveness of sins and we must repent and believe in the gospel.

I think sometimes we over-complicate salvation, now it’s a continual choice and we have to be continually turning away from sin and asking for forgiveness but you get to control that. In the year of comp planner which we haven’t made available publicly we might later, but we wanted it to be for our members, because we really wanted to test it quite thoroughly before we offer it publicly. But in this year of comp planner that we made and it’s a quarterly planner, so you get three months at a time. We list out some promises of the Lord that God is good, and he is loving, and he provides, and he made you for a purpose, and he is always with you. His presence is always there. And he will give you grace for anything that he calls you to. So, remember we don’t get grace for our imaginary problems, but he always gives us enough grace for what he wants us to do. His mercy is endless; he is our strength. We are free in him and he is our hope.

And so on the daily page in this planner, we list all of God’s promises and we ask, you know, what promise of the Lord will you think about today? And so first, I just want you to think about what your problems are. What are you struggling with? I’ve been working on a program for women who are in painful marriages and one of the the things that’s so difficult about being in a painful marriage is that you’re so lonely, like this deep sense of loneliness, even though you’re married and maybe have lots of children around you and maybe you’re very plugged into your parish. And so that’s where I would look at the promise that God is always present. He is always with you so you do not need to feel lonely. And again, you’re going to feel it that’s going to come up, but that’s when I want you to run to the heart of the Lord and say, Lord, you hold my heart.

You are with me so I don’t feel lonely. Another one of the promises is that God will provide, he has provided for you every day of your life. Why would you think he’s not going to continue doing that? It may not look the way that you think but it will be there. I’ve been reading Viktor Frankl’s man’s search for meaning because even though I, people mentioned that book often. I thought I just don’t ever remember. I mean, I know what the book was about, but I just don’t even remember specifically and I feel like I’ve changed so much as a person, and the last 10 years that I wanted to read it again. And so I’ve just been sitting with the incredible Adversity that people were dealing with and you know, some people were able to cling to the Lord in that time. And to believe that God is good and that God still loved them and that they, that their life had purpose and meaning.

He is also our hope. There are so many worldly human aspects of our life when we look at them, it feels hopeless, but our hope is in heaven in the end. And I have to remind myself that because sometimes that doesn’t feel good, right. Sometimes if you’re going through something difficult and you think this is going to be difficult for my whole life. Let’s say that you, I have a friend who’s just gone through a lot of health stuff right now and Severely allergic to a lot of things and it’s looking pretty likely that she’s just not going to get to eat very much food, a variety of food for the rest of her life. And we don’t know when she’s working through it, but let’s just say right now she got a memo from the Lord who was like, yes, you were only going to be able to eat these 10 things for the rest of your life. It would be a natural reaction to feel discouraged to lack hope around that. But then it is our job to come back in and remind our brain, hey, I know that a lifetime might feel really long. Let’s say, let’s say you’re going to live to be 80 and I’m about to turn 40, so let’s say I’m halfway through my life.

And 40 years of a difficult cross that would feel so disheartening. But eternity is much longer than that and if we believe that God is who he says he is, and that the whole Catholic church spiel is true then that 40 years is a blink. And I’ve shared with you, you guys that sometimes I have a weird, like lack of belief around heaven. I’m like, it sounds too good to be true but anytime I feel like that first of all, I just recognize that it’s a thought error, it’s just not true, but I’m okay with exploring it and that’s when I will often look at the Eucharistic miracles or some of the miracles that we have or even just the shroud of Turin or the Thelma that we have. Like there are some crazy artifacts and miracles that we have absolute proof of. I was talking to somebody about that, The Shroud of Turin, which is the most studied artifact in the world, which does not surprise me because it’s unexplainable. I mean, especially if you don’t believe in Christ that points to Christianity.

But the Thelma that we have, which is just also just completely unexplainable every time they do any testing on it, they’re like, we don’t understand why it hasn’t broken down. We don’t understand how the image is there, it’s just crazy. That is purely a Catholic thing and then the number of Eucharistic miracles that we have, including the one where it was bleeding and they took the blood and sent it to the lab didn’t tell them what it was. And the results, like the lab people were like, what is this? It doesn’t make any sense. Because it was Jesus’s blood and so whenever I’m feeling, this is kind of my, if we could do a flow chart of unhappiness, It will be something as difficult in my life. And then I think, oh, this will never change and I’m going to deal with this for the whole rest of my life, which may or may not be true. But let’s say that it is, let’s say that you, you know, are. going to suffer with arthritis for the rest of your life. And then that feels really discouraging and you feel sad or hopeless.

Then I try to remind myself, hey, but remember, life is short and eternity is long. And then I will remind myself or go read about something that shows my brain. That God is real, that Jesus was the son of God and that heaven is in fact real, and that is what fills me with hope. But it’s a process I’m not walking around feeling sparkly, hope all the time. But I’m encouraging all of you to just notice why you’re upset. Where possible check in on the facts there, because a lot of times the thing that we’re upset about we’re not describing factually. But then once you have a handle on what’s difficult and it is probably a cross that God has given you, but remember because he is good, this is going to be an important part of your story. It’s a scary part of the movie but that our hope comes from him. So when you are lonely, he is with you, when you feel tired? I want you to pray for grace, and I want you to pray for the gift of fortitude.

He does not give us things that are beyond our control or our ability to show up for them and maybe not the way that we think. I think about Jobs sometimes, I think about him losing all of those children, and you know, the way he coped with it was rough. He wasn’t like, God gives us enough grace, like you know, he kind of shut down as a human and he still believed in the goodness of God. And God gave him enough grace to live every day that God wanted a job to live. And so sometimes it looks like that, so I want you guys to remember that God is always the answer and it’s okay to Google things, and it’s okay to have a planner and to make plans but I want us to first run to him. I want us to first remember his promises and that he is unchanging and that he is the answer for whatever you’re going through.

I really promise even things that are pretty gnarly when we finally do this, when we finally run to the heart of Jesus and we just cling to his heart and we let go of everything else, we set everything else down our expectations, our entitlements are, our desire for comfort and for fun or for entertainment, our pride fullness at the way that we look in the world and we set it all down and we run to him and we hold onto his heart and we say that is enough. It’s amazing how okay we feel, how much peace we feel and then we find that hope, and that we feel free and we feel strong. And we don’t feel alone, and we know that he has a purpose for us. If you woke up today, he has a purpose for you and you are so loved. I wish I could take everybody today and wrap them in a warm fluffy cloud of love so that you could see how much. The Lord loves you. It’s beyond our understanding.

All right my friends, release it with this. This week, this idea of running to the Lord and that he is the answer to everything. I am praying for you, please pray for me.

Thank you so much for listening and have a blessed day.