Insider's View

November 27, 2021

Posted onAuthorTerry Modica

Insider's View newsletter

For you this week:

  • Reflection for Saturday: God wants to heal your fears
  • Inside the Ministry: My mom needs your prayers
  • Free download: Novena for the end of the Year of St. Joseph
  • This week’s WordBytes faith-builder: Have We Lost Faithfulness, Trust and Courage?

Saturday November 27, 2021

ScripturesDaniel 7:15-27
Daniel 3:82-87
Luke 21:34-36
bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/112721.cfm
Podcast:
bible.usccb.org/podcasts/audio/2021-11-27

Saints Calendar:
gnm.org/saints-find/saints-calendar

Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life. (From Saturday’s Gospel reading)

Reflection for Saturday: God wants to heal your fears

Father GodDo you forget sometimes that God wants to heal your fears? Examine the role that fear has been playing in your life. Ask yourself, “What’s keeping me from fully trusting in God’s goodness toward me? How does fear play into this?”

Fear is our enemy. God’s love is the cure for all of our traumas and every fear, every worry, every anxiety. The safe and perfect love that we do not receive from humans is readily available from him. Do we really believe this? It seems that most people do not.

It’s not something that is taught often enough in religious education classrooms, homilies, and adult faith formation events. I’ve met many good, faith-filled people who are ridden with anxiety. The reason, in many cases, is that we tend to expect—even demand—that our peace and joy come from other people doing what they are called to do (i.e., love as they should with the love of Christ).

A wife expects her husband to love her faithfully, listen to her because he cares, and humbly apologize when he’s wronged her. The husband expects his wife to be supportive of him in his trials, love him no matter what mood he’s in, and humbly apologize when she’s wronged him. The truth is: This is the love that God calls for in the Vocation of Marriage, so of course it’s expected. The fact is: Everyone fails. Humans will always disappoint us.

Only God’s love is perfect. And it requires spiritual and emotional discipline to turn to him and let his more-than-enough love become our more-than-enough peace and joy.

Abba-Father’s touch is very healing. But people run and hide from it. And yet, despite their best efforts to make a good life for themselves, hiding from God actually increases their fear, worry and anxiety. If they don’t recognize this as a wake-up call but continue trying to hide from the God who sees all and knows all, their thought-processes become irrational. Their inner soul, which knew God from the day of their conception, is in conflict with their minds and their wills.

As Saint Augustine so famously said to God, “You arouse us so that praising You may bring us joy, because You have made us and drawn us to Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.”

Whether a fear is small or huge, it disempowers us at the very time we’re seeking to gain control. God wants to heal your fears! For example, the fear of not being able to find employment after being laid off from a job can pull us away from God’s help by convincing us that we’re failures, Fear lies to us, and so we lose the freedom to be who we truly are and to do what we’re gifted and called by God to do.

Abba-Father, in contrast, freely gives us freedom: freedom from sin through Christ, and then freedom to be his adopted children—with all that this includes.

Saint John tells us in his first epistle: “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” (1 John 4:18 NIV) What are you afraid of?

When we understand what it means to be loved by Abba-Father, fear dissipates. How much anxiety we have is an indicator of how well we understand (or remember) Abba’s love. To overcome anxiety, first identify the misconceptions you’re believing about God, then ask the Holy Spirit to fill you with the truth about each misconception.

Excerpted from my new book, The Father’s Heart.

Inside the Ministry: My mom needs your prayers

On Tuesday, my mom (Pamela, age 90) went into the hospital because her blood pressure spiked, she fainted, and so she fell and hit her head. A small bit of bleeding in her cerebellum caused on-going dizziness. Praise the Lord, her fall did not break any bones! I’m writing this on Wednesday. If you want to reply to this or to get updates, please do it only in one of our online prayer groups:

Thank you for your prayer support.

Free download:
Our novena for the end of the Year of St. Joseph

Saint JosephDo you know about the time Saint Joseph appeared to two Franciscan friars in Belgium? They were sailing when a terrible storm arose, wrecking their ship. The two friars prayed as they clung to a plank. When their strength grew weak, they called upon Saint Joseph to save them. The waves continued to beat them. Their arms became numb. The plank became more and more slippery and insecure. They continued to call for Saint Joseph’s help. Suddenly a majestic young man stood next to them and told them to be of good cheer. Their tired arms gained new strength. The plank reshaped into a boat and their helper rowed them to shore. After they landed, they knelt down, raised their hands to Heaven and praised God for their miraculous escape. Then they profusely thanked their rescuer and asked him his name.

The man replied, “I am Joseph to whom you cried in your distress.” And he added that he would always love and help anyone who piously meditates on the joys and sorrows of Saint Joseph’s life.

Tuesday November 30 is the last opportunity in the Year of Saint Joseph to begin a nine-day consecration. We have a booklet for you! Our Novena Consecration to Saint Joseph gives you nine little stories about apparitions of Joseph and a prayer for each meditation.

With this free PDF booklet, you can seal yourself as Saint Joseph’s child. You will place into his fatherly protection yourself, your families, your jobs and ministries, and the Church. We also consecrate to his fatherhood those who are not following Christ, especially our own family members, because Joseph’s desire in heaven is that all of his children love his son, Jesus, and follow him to everlasting life.

You can download it free for personal use from “Saint Joseph for your home and family” gnm.org/saints-find/saint-joseph-for-your-home-and-family.

WordBytes

This week’s recommended faith-builder:
Have We Lost Faithfulness, Trust and Courage?

We’re alarmed about how increasingly un-Christian our society is becoming. In the Church, I hear lots of blame being cast in the wrong direction. In an attempt to return to a time when faithfulness to Christian morality seemed much more commonplace, there’s a growing desire to regain “conservative” values. Good! But the trend is to take this too far: ultra-conservatism with a longing to return the Church to the way it was before Vatican Council II.

Why? Because obedience and faithfulness deteriorated after that Council. But let’s widen our lens and look at what was happening in society coincidentally the same time as Vatican Council II. It was the 1960s, the decade of the sexual revolution and the loosening of social mores. Changes in society eroded faithfulness, not the changes in the Church.

For more on this, visit wordbytes.org/faqs/faithfulness-trust-courage.

WordBytes is a library of Catholic faith-building articles by Good News Ministries. Come on in and explore! Visit WordBytes.org today.

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God bless you!

Every morning, I lift up in prayer everyone who helps Good News Ministries in any way (donors, volunteers, prayer supporters, etc.) and all the prayer requests posted on our site. What can I cover in prayer for you? Post your prayer request.

How else can the team and I serve you today? Visit our homepage.

Thank you for reading this newsletter.

Terry ModicaYour servant in Christ,
Terry Modica, Executive Director
Good News Ministries
gnm.org

Let’s connect in GNM’s community: See you there!

Keep your eyes on Jesus!
And when you have to look at others, see them through his eyes.

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