Faith Sharing Fridays November 20, 2015

Gospel for Sunday, November 22nd

When you are a child, and another child takes your toy from you, it seems like your world has been turned upside down. When you are a teenager and you feel like you don’t have any true friends, again your world is turned upside down. When you are in college and you don’t know what you want to do with your life or who you want to be, your world feels upside down. When you have a stressful job and that is all that is on your mind, once again, you feel your world turned upside down.

No matter what phase of life we are in, we have experienced those difficult moments where it seems like it is impossible to get through it. The challenge is overwhelming and you don’t know how to make it work. Yet, somehow, we always make it to the other side. Looking back on these challenges, I can see that they are “worldly”. And in the Gospel, we are reminded that the kingdom of God does not belong to this world.

Of course, this does not diminish the challenges we have, but rather this allows us to put it into perspective and hopefully make it through our challenges with courage, like Jesus. The kingdom of God does not belong to this world, but it can still be found within it. Those moments of pure joy and peace are the moments when we rest in the kingdom of God on earth. Those moments can give us courage to continue through our challenges.

An Undergraduate Woman

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As I read this reflection, I realized that the events of this past weekend are spoken through these words. Lives were turned upside down, the world was turned upside down in shock and horror as we watched the headlines ablaze with news of death and terror. BUT out of that darkness, love and light poured through – a call for peace, a call for solidarity, a call for prayer – for God’s Kingdom to reign here on Earth. In the outpouring of support for the victims of the Paris attack, in #prayforParis, I saw God’s kingdom giving courage to those suffering to make it through the challenge. So for this week, I chose a picture that shows that God’s kingdom can still be found within our world.

An Undergraduate Woman

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From Isobel Bowdery, a survivor of the attack:

“But being a survivor of this horror lets me able to shed light on the heroes. To the man who reassured me and put his life on line to try and cover my brain whilst I whimpered, to the couple whose last words of love kept me believing the good in the world, to the police who succeeded in rescuing hundreds of people, to the complete strangers who picked me up from the road and consoled me during the 45 minutes I truly believed the boy I loved was dead, to the injured man who I had mistaken for him and then on my recognition that he was not Amaury, held me and told me everything was going to be fine despite being all alone and scared himself, to the woman who opened her doors to the survivors, to the friend who offered me shelter and went out to buy new clothes so I wouldn’t have to wear this blood stained top, to all of you who have sent caring messages of support – you make me believe this world has the potential to be better. to never let this happen again.”