Little Johnny wanted a baby brother. His dad said, "If you pray every day for two months, God will give you one."
Johnny prayed for a whole month, then quit. A month later Johnny's mother went to the hospital. When she came home, his dad pulled back the blanket and there were twins. Johnny's dad said, "Now aren't you glad you prayed?"
Johnny replied, "Yes, but aren't you glad I quit when I did?"
In "The Internal Battle for our Souls" author Ron Rolheiser says, "The greatest moral danger in our lives is that we stop praying!" Ron points out what Aristotle said: Two contraries cannot co-exist inside the same subject something can't be light and dark at the same time.
"At any given moment, inside us, we are a mixture of light and darkness saint and sinner," Ron points out. "Henri Nouwen used to say: We want to be great saints, but we also don't want to miss out on all the sensations that sinners experience. And so our lives aren't simple."
What we need to do, Ron says, is pray regularly. "If we sustain genuine prayer we will never, long-term, fall into moral rationalization prayer brings into our lives, a genuine presence of God," Ron says. "And God will not peacefully co-exist with selfishness and sin."
Ron goes on to say we have been faithful to Christ's command to celebrate the Eucharist. We have done this for 2,000 years. There is something great and exciting about this liturgical prayer of the church that is going on all over the world every hour of every day.
Through Baptism we become children of God and heirs of heaven. We become brothers and sisters of Christ, so to speak. And if we believe the saints like St Augustine, when we receive the Eucharist, "We become what we eat!"
Have you ever pondered the mystery of the Trinity? Have you ever considered how you are a part of the trinity? Can you imagine God looking down on you and saying, "This is my beloved daughter"? "This is my beloved son"?
In the theme song of Trinity Is My Name, a parody of the Old West movies, we hear: you've got to be Trinity Trinity stand tall / Turn the tables around. Trinity is a lazy, no good character, who just happens to be fast with a gun. He turns things around by helping others and bringing law and order to town.
We can "stand tall" and "turn the tables around" by following the simple formula don't stop praying! The Lord has made it easier for us by establishing the church to assist us in our journey.
Like Trinity, in the movie, we are also gifted with certain talents that we could use to help "turn things around" in this world struggling for light.
