Dear Friends,

  There are certain passages of Scripture that seem to speak directly to the times we live in. This weekend, we hear one of them from St. Paul:

   “Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect.”

   Those words are as countercultural today as they were when St. Paul first wrote them.

   Our culture constantly tells us that life is about me: my wants, my desires, my happiness, my truth, my body - my choice, my identity. We are told to look within ourselves to discover who we are and then to expect the world around us to affirm whatever we find.

   St. Paul offers something completely different.

   He tells us to offer ourselves to God — not just a part of ourselves, not simply an hour on Sunday, but our whole selves: our minds, our bodies, our desires, our plans, our relationships, our gifts, our time and even our very identities. “Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.

    “That can sound rather scary because we might imagine that surrendering ourselves to God means somehow losing ourselves. Christianity teaches the opposite. When we give ourselves to God, we do not become less ourselves. We become more fully the people we were created to be.

   After all, God made us. He knows us better than we know ourselves. He knows our gifts and our weaknesses, our hopes and our fears, our possibilities and our limitations. The eyes of the world will constantly judge us, categorize us, compare us, and tell us who we should be. But ultimately there is only one set of eyes that matters: the eyes of the One who created us and loves us.

   As summer begins to wind down, students return to school, parents return to familiar routines, and the pace of “non-summer life” begins again, perhaps these words of St. Paul are what we need to carry with us:

   “Do not conform yourselves to this age.”

   Let’s ask ourselves this question each day: What does God want for me?

   And then comes the harder question: Am I willing to give Him all of myself and trust that He knows who I am meant to become?

God bless you all!

Fr. John