Bear the hardship of the gospel: Spend 5 with Jesus: March 5, 2023

Bear the hardship of the gospel Beloved: Bear your share of hardship for the gospel with the strength that comes from God. Too often I think the feeling is that following Jesus should be something easy. Further, following Jesus should be something that makes everything go perfectly in our lives. If we follow Jesus, we should experience goodness. All the time. Everywhere. Hardship? Not at all. But living the gospel, following Jesus, being authentic in our faith, that is not easy. If you have paid attention to just the daily Mass readings for yesterday and the day before, you know that. There simply are going to be times where the gospel brings hardship to us. Are you ready for that? Do you think you can bear your share of the hardship? If you are only thinking of what you can do yourself, the answer, of course, is no. We cannot bear the hardship of the gospel on our own. It is not easy to be faithful to the gospel, because sometimes we do not want to be nice to others, to forgive, to imitate Jesus, to stand up for what is right in the face of harm. But the good news of the gospel is that we do not need to do this on our own. We have "the strength that comes from God." We simply need to accept God's love, God's grace, and God will give us the strength we need. God also surrounds us with a cloud of witnesses, both on this earth and in heaven. So when you are faced with the unbelievable challenge of standing up for what is right when it is hard to do so, when you are called to feed Jesus when you see him in the poor, or to deal with that situation, circumstance or person that is difficult, know that you never do this on your own. You have the strength of God to help.