Love Is The Answer!
Some years ago, a kind of poll was conducted in which parents were asked, “If you had it to do all over again, would you have children?” Incredibly, seventy per cent of those who responded answered, “No. If we had it to do all over again we would not have children.” (One has to wonder what motivated that particular group of individuals to answer in a way so far outside of the norm). The editors of a popular religious magazine were deeply disturbed by these numbers. Perhaps the poll was flawed in some way, they reasoned. And so they decided to ask their own readers to respond to the same question. Whereupon, they were deluged with letters from parents who said, “Yes! We would do it all over again.” One letter, from a mother, read as follows:
Our nine-year-old daughter, Christine, is stubborn, incredibly bossy, and an unrelenting know-it-all. She requires ten minutes of super-salesmanship before she’ll brush her teeth or wash her face. She’s on the verge of having her bedroom condemned by the Board of Health. But even if I had a magic crystal ball ten years ago to let me see all this mess, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that I would have done it all over again. Why? Love is the answer!
I have no doubt every parent here today would echo that feeling: LOVE IS THE ANSWER!
In today's Gospel Lesson, Jesus speaks to His disciples of Perfect Love -- the Perfect Model for our human relationships, the Perfect Family, the Divine Family: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. "Everything the Father has is Mine," Jesus says (Jn. 16:15). And "When the Spirit of Truth comes He will lead you to the complete Truth" (Jn. 16:13). As a Christian community, we have the perfect model for living our lives in the Spirit of Truth, which is the Spirit of Love.
A teacher asked her third-graders to write about their personal heroes. One little girl brought her essay home and showed it to her parents. Her father was flattered to discover that his daughter had chosen [...]
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Stories you can use...
We've got a million of them (well, almost).
Knowledge
The Germans have two words for the verb “to know.” One word is “kennen” which means to know with your mind. The other word is “wissen” (pronounce vissen) which means to know at the deepest level of your being. The problem is that many of you know the Good News of the Gospel in a “kennen” kind of way. You know it intellectually. You accept it! “I accept; I believe,” you say. And you wonder (sometimes out loud) why we preachers keep gong on this way about God’s love for us. The answer is — and the problem is — that so few of us know this in a “wissen” kind of way, down at the deepest level of our being. The proof of this is in the way we live. We don’t translate this into our daily lives because we haven’t allowed it to take hold of our full beings. We know but we don’t “understand.”
Motherhood
These lines come from a young Glasgow mother. She calls it, simply, “A Mother’s Prayer.” Oh, God, you know I’m busy each moment of the day; please help me to remember that I still have time to pray. Grant me patience and good humour,contentment with my lot. Help me show by my example what I’d like my children taught. Help me make a happy home, the way a home should be, wherein the trust of all of usremains secure in Thee.
Graduation
“Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong” (I Corinthians 1:26-27). The late Theodore Geisel, best known as the author of the “Dr. Seuss” children’s books, was once invited to give the commencement address at a college in Illinois. He began his speech on a humble note. “It seems behooven upon me,” he said, “to bring forth great words of wisdom to this graduation class as it leaves these cloistered halls to enter the outside world...my wisdom is in rather short supply, and I have managed to condense everything I know into this epic poem consisting of fourteen lines.” He then proceeded to recite his “epic poem,” entitled, “My Uncle Terwilliger on the Art of Eating Popovers”: My uncle ordered popovers from the restaurant’s bill of fare And, when they were served, he regarded them with a penetrating stare... Then he spoke great words of wisdom as he sat them on the chair: ”To eat these things,” said my uncle, ”You may swallow down what’s solid... But...you must spit out the air!” And, as you partake of the world’s bill of fare, that’s darned good advice to follow Do a lot of spitting out of the hot air, And be careful what you swallow.
Death
A little girl’s pet cat died and her mother, trying to comfort her, said, “But dear, don’t you know that Fluffy is up in Heaven now with God?” The little girl cried all the more and said, “Mommy, what in the world does God want with a dead cat?”
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