Tuesday February 7, 2023

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“God created each one as a masterpiece whom He treasures and wants to live with forever.”

Good News Reflection for:

Tuesday of the Fifth week in Ordinary Time
February 7, 2023

Today’s Prayer:

My Lord, please heal my heart of all doubt and indifference to Your Fatherly love. Thank You for giving me the gift of life. Amen.

Subscribe to Today’s Saint Quote & Prayer:
gnm.org/SaintQuotes/

Today’s Readings:

Genesis 1:20 — 2:4a
Ps 8: (2ab)4-9
Mark 7:1-13
bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/020723.cfm
USCCB Podcast of the Readings:
bible.usccb.org/podcasts/audio/daily-mass-reading-podcast-february-7-2023

You are a masterpiece of God!

In today’s first reading, God reaches the high point of his handiwork by creating you and me and every human person who was ever conceived. We are his masterpieces! Yes, even the unborn human who dies in miscarriage or abortion — God created each one as a masterpiece whom he treasures and wants to live with forever.

Do you feel like a piece of junk? That’s not his opinion of you. Okay, so you’re not perfect; big deal. When God looks at you, he doesn’t see the crud that tarnishes you; he sees the gem underneath — a beautiful, bright, multi-hued gem. Even when he looks at the most evil person on earth, he sees the goodness that he created, where it lies buried inside.

And he says, “This is very good!”

When Jesus took our crud with him to the cross, he made it easier for our gems to get cleaned up and polished. Baptism and Confession are sacraments that wash the crud from us as we give it all to Jesus. When our Father looks at you and me, he looks at us through these sacraments to see the masterpieces that he created.

So why do we have a hard time believing that God likes us? Why do we have a hard time liking ourselves? It’s because we project onto God the image and likeness of humans, specifically the people who’ve disliked us when we failed to live up to their expectations.

Our prayer life is affected by this. The Person of the Trinity to whom we entrust our prayers is Our Father. Yet, because our human fathers and other authority figures could not be trusted all the time (none are perfectly trustable), we assume that God will disappoint us, too. It’s not that we think God is incapable of answering our prayers; we just think we’re not good enough.

In truth, being “good enough” has nothing to do with it. We can’t earn his help and he doesn’t even want us to try. He gives his help freely and generously, simply because he loves us and, in the first place, because he cared enough to create us. The real reason why prayers don’t get answered is either because we’re blocking the help we need or because God is doing something far better for us and we can’t see it yet.

You’re not junk. You’re God’s masterpiece, and to deny that is to deny what Jesus did on the cross for you. It also denies that the Father said, “This is very good!” when he formed you in your mother’s womb. The Father’s creative genius is seen in all of nature, but you’re his ultimate creation!

For more on this, read our WordByte “Healing Our Image of God’s Fatherhood” @ https://wordbytes.org/suffering/gods-fatherhood/.

© 2023 by Terry A. Modica

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