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Readings for Today. Listen to our other podcasts.
When we are doing what we know is wrong, we find those who live the virtues we do not to be obnoxious.
Our Least Favorite Word – NO
Probably the least favorite word, the first least favorite word that we learned in our lives was the word “no.” If you think of a little toddler, they say the terrible twos. My experience from a distance is that they’re not the terrible twos or the terrible threes, but that’s a different story.
But nonetheless, tell a toddler “no” and that often results in a great difficulty. There can be a meltdown, there can be anger, they can say things like “I hate you” because they don’t like the word “no.”
Now there’s an irony when I used to do sessions to help parents interact with their adolescents that all of the things that parents learn that work when they’re kids or toddlers work all over again when they’re adolescents. Give them choices, say you can do this, this, or this, and the reason is that psychologically the task is the same.
It’s actually seeking a certain level of independence and knowing how to take care of myself in appropriate ways for the time in my life. But I digress.
We don’t ever really outgrow that. At least I know I don’t. I’d like to think that I do. I’d like to think that I’ve gotten better at saying “yes God, whatever you want.” But I don’t know that I can really fully, completely, totally, and entirely commit to that for a day, let alone for my life.
“Dear Lord, I only am going to do what you want me to do today.” I might even believe that when I say it, but I know that that’s not true. I know I’m going to want to do what I want to do.
And the first reading then points out what happens if we can’t grab hold of this feeling and direct it towards God. We begin to resent those who do the right thing and challenge us when we don’t. We begin to say, “Well, just who do they think they are? Oh, they’re just a goody two-shoes, always trying to do the right thing. They’re just trying to show me up.”
And we see that if we don’t get a hold of that emotion, it can take us out of control indeed. And we can not only resent them or feel badly, we can seek to eliminate them from our lives. Now, I don’t mean that we’re going around thinking of killing people, but we can simply not listen to anything that they say, not look at them, badmouth them at every turn.
And I would think that that’s the challenge of our current culture. We just don’t want to listen to people who strongly disagree with us. And I think that’s the greatest threat to our country, our inability to listen to people whose views we could describe just like the wicked describe the just person.
We can say there are certain people whose views are obnoxious to us. We can say that there are certain people who set themselves against our way of doing things and so forth. Now, it is not to say that everyone who disagrees with us is right.
But if we go into every conversation convinced that everything we believe is right and everything that they don’t is wrong, then in fact, we’re going to make no progress in actually recognizing that maybe we don’t know all of the things we need to know.
The focus of today’s reading, though, is on our spiritual life, because as much as we may not like it, we have to admit that God is always right. God’s values are always the most supreme. God’s priorities are always the most important.
Let us ask the Lord today to help us to know those priorities, to see them more clearly in our lives, to love them with all our hearts, and to live them with complete fidelity because of God’s grace. with complete fidelity because of God’s grace.
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