Help all make a safe/happy passage

26th March 2012   ·   0 Comments

By Fr. Jerome LeDoux
Contributing Columnist

“Safe trip!” “Have a safe payday loans fee trip!” “Blessings on your journey!” “My prayers go with you!” “May God be your copilot!” “Go with God!” “Come home safely!” “Just remember, I’ll say a little prayer for you. I pray for you every day.”

All this and more accompanies us when we are about to embark on a journey. The best wishes, the prayers and the very heartbeat of our loved ones remain behind us physically, but mentally, emotionally and spiritually they are ever with us as we leave. All these heartfelt wishes and prayers are summed up powerfully in the word love.

This safe/happy passage prayer is the mirror image of what we should be doing during the season of Lent. Yet more, Lent is but the reminder, the springboard of what we should be doing every day, every hour throughout our life on earth. At say yes payday loan no moment must we be unaware that we are on a perilous journey together, reaching for God’s kingdom.

Perilous though it be, this journey nevertheless should be mostly a pleasant one amid all the pains, trials, setbacks, disappointments and failures that befall us frequently, and amid the pitfalls and obstacle courses that lie in wait, seeming to dog our every step.

It is quite literally up to us to choose what kind and what quality of journey we are going to make. Not that we can choose our birth, our place of origin or the circumstances and events that will inevitably come our way. With God’s help, rather than choose them we can customize them to make the best of the hand that is dealt us in life.

Lent awakens us, pinches us and challenges us to slough bad credit loan online personal our old skin and tissues as a snake does, and to grow fresh and anew in every way. With our old impediments and baggage out of the way, we will be lean, clean service machines ready to be all we can be and to serve all our sisters and brothers well as we make our daily journey through life.

Such a meaningful, fruitful journey is entirely possible provided we keep in mind that this earth is not our proper homeland, since we are aliens in a foreign land. Job 7 gives perhaps too dreary an assessment to be encouraging, “Is not man’s life on earth a drudgery? Are not his days those of a hireling? He is a slave who longs for the shade, a hireling who waits for his wages.”

Paul, a Roman citizen, gives us a strong but how to credit check much more comforting view of our status on earth, “Our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we also await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will change our lowly body to conform to his glorified body by the power that enables him also to bring all things into subjection to himself.”

That we are but sojourners on a pilgrimage here on earth where we own nothing is confirmed by Jesus in Mark 12 in the parable of the tenant farmers. With no radical ownership of anything, we are tenant farmers who sweat in the fields and hope for a cut from the crops. Matthew 25:14 gives us a similar message in the parable of the talents.

It is up to us through God’s grace to make this tenant farming, this cultivation of talents a tolerable, even pleasurable russ dalbey cash venture both for ourselves and our fellow travelers. Even hard work is a God-given privilege that we must exploit to the full as tenant farmers determined to make the most and the best of our one shot at living this life right.

I have said it often and I’ll say it again. As believers, it is to our benefit in every way to walk hand in hand during our sojourn here on earth, traveling with love and joy to our permanent home. Alone, we are lonely, less cou­ra­g­eous, perhaps even cy­ni­cal, and more in danger of not finding the true road to our eternal home in heaven.

We embark on many journeys during our lifetime, some important, others of little import. But all these trips are integral parts of the big one that we make while we are making the christian microcredit loans other trips. Every smile, each word of encouragement, all the little things we can do to strengthen and heal others make our communal journey a successful venture.

Walking hand in hand, how many folks do you plan to bring along with you to accompany you into our Father’s kingdom? Think of Deacon Freddie Johnson, father of our church member Quentin Johnson, who baptized 17,000 people during his lifetime.

That sounds like James 5:19, “If anyone among you should stray from the truth and someone bring him back, he should know that whoever brings back a sinner from the error of his way will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.”

This article was originally published in the March 26, 2012 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper