Our Lord just raises Lazarus from the dead, and the many Jews came to believe in Jesus
right after that, and so the Pharisees are all worried and upset that Jesus, that everyone's
going to go over to Jesus and they're all going to leave them and see them for what
they are, and our Lord will continue to be in opposition to them, and they see their
power growing less, and so they want to destroy Jesus, and so we see the evil growing in the
monks of the Pharisees and the lies that they're spreading, and how they're trying to influence
the people, and this is something that God allowed.
Jesus.
God allowed the evil was spreading and growing and getting stronger and stronger, and you
had the contrast between them and Jesus, Jesus who was goodness himself, and I can't help
but compare this to the day and age that we're living in now, where evil is spreading and
growing stronger, and those who are in power don't have a good ingenuity.
They don't have a good agenda, and they want to spread it and even oppress and silence
those who oppose them, and so I think, you know, we're looking at times now where things
are going to get more and more evil, and persecution may spread, and we have perhaps a short time
to prepare ourselves.
We can see the signs of the times.
We don't have to, you know, be prophetic at all.
We can just look at the signs of the times, what's happening in our culture, in our government,
and those who are in power, what's before us, and we can see it in other nations, too,
in Europe and all around the world, the evils that are spreading and gaining strength.
And so we can look at what we should do, that we need to gain strength.
We need to gain strength for what may come in the very near future for us, especially
we who are holding the truth, holding onto the truth, the gospel, the Catholic faith,
goodness.
We are trying to live a good life ourselves and to spread it, and we will most likely
come upon greatness.
Great opposition and maybe stresses, maybe dangers to our own selves, and we need to
be ready.
We need to be ready with a stronger life of prayer, a stronger devotion to the sacraments,
confession in the Eucharist where we gain that strength that we don't have, and through
prayer, we need to buckle down more and devote ourselves more strongly to the sources of
strength that we will need in the times to come.
And in the strength that we will have by doing that, we will be able to support others
who are not strong, whose faith is weak, who want to be good and want to do the right thing,
but they may be pressured by the powers that will be applied to them, and they need to
hold onto pillars, strong pillars, and we need to be them.
We need to be those pillars.
But we won't.
Unless we are strong ourselves, unless we do strengthen ourselves in these perhaps remaining
years before things really change for the much worse.
I think we should think seriously on that and how we should reform our lives more and
devote ourselves more strongly to prayer and the sacraments, and if we don't, then we too
can succumb.
We may not be faithful to our Lord when the times get tough.
So let us cling even more strongly to Our Lady and let her guide us more and we take
our consecration more and more seriously and find our refuge there, find our strength there
and our enlightenment on how we should brace ourselves and how we should strengthen ourselves
in Our Lady and what we should do, what path we should follow.
To greater holiness and strength in Jesus and in Our Lady.
Amen.