In our first reading, St. James reminds us of how God wants us to treat with him, how
he wants us to resist the devil, and he will flee from you, draw near to God, and he will
draw near to you.
And we have that sort of reflected in the responsorials, throw your cares upon the Lord
and he will support you.
God wants us to draw close to him as maybe in contrast to the Old Testament where you
think of Mount Sinai where there's lightning and thunder and earthquakes and the people
were terrified of God and so they wouldn't, and even God told them not to approach the
mountain or they'll die because they were unfaithful to him, they were hard-hearted
and they didn't have the grace to pray.
And so God had to treat them that way and to keep them from sinning, he had to give
them that fear, but that fear isn't gone now.
God does not want us to live in fear anymore.
He wants us to have the fear of the Lord, fear of offending God, but not fear of approaching
him.
He wants us to approach him, he wants us to draw close to him, and our whole Catholic
faith is designed.
It's designed to draw us closer to our Lord as we come to the altar, as we come to the
Eucharist, and we come to, we have the sacramentals, we have all these tangible things that we
can touch and feel and kiss and hold close and use our senses to draw closer to God.
And this is what our Lord wants.
He came to us first.
God came to us.
He came to us and became man and lived among us and he found his delight in the company
of men and he wants us to draw close to him.
He wants us to have an intimate relationship with him, which means close, to be close to
him.
And even our prayers need to reflect that and if we don't talk to God, we're not going
to be close to him.
He wants us to be best friends with him, which means we must pray much.
We must talk.
We need to talk to him often.
We need to talk to him in words that are intimate and close and personal and we even see that
in the words we use, the thou and thy and thine and those words actually bring us, make
us think in terms of closeness to God if we use the words you or you over there and makes
us think a little more in a distance.
So even our words.
So even our words.
Our words should draw us closer to God in our prayers and our thoughts and Our Lady
too is a help to draw us closer to God and that's her role to bring us closer to God,
to draw us to be that glue and that binding with God as a mother would always wants to
keep the family close to their father and to their brothers and sisters.
So she has that role of bringing us closer to God.
She has that new body of confidence, she will always want to be close to God and before
God, she will want to be close to You.
So again, our
sons are right next to us, they are.
Thank you.
Thank you.
We'd love to hear your thoughts.
Serve God better.
God bless you.