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So, I have a twitter. (@homerun_mary if you care)

Yep, I said it. I admit. I'm a twitter-holic. Well, not really. But I use twitter mostly to talk about one of my favorite past times (baseball). So you can imagine how down my twitter feed gets during this part of the year. Yep, the off season.

I decided, however, that at the end of the baseball season I was going to try and "follow" more Catholic people. More inspirational people so that I could dive a little deeper each and every day on one of my favorite social media outlets.

Insert: the key to twitter is to have something to talk about.

Anyways, I was on it today, as I am every other day, and I follow some pretty awesome people. But someone retweeted this verse and it really hit me.

hard.

it said:
Jesus said, "Stay awake and pray so that you won't enter into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." (Mark 14:38)

Now if you remember this part of the bible, Jesus was speaking with his disciples who had already fallen asleep once. This was one of Jesus' last moments as a "free" man. It was right before he was fully betrayed by Judas. It was His last few moments with our Lord before he was taken to suffer. Yet, was he worried about himself?

Well yeah, a little. But it wasn't all about him. He told his best friends to "Stay awake and pray so that you won't enter into temptation"

hmm. "so that you won't enter into temptation" that sounds familiar.

 "Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. ¹⁰Your kingdom come, your will be done,
    on earth as it is in heaven.
¹¹ Give us this day our daily bread,¹²and forgive us our debts,
   as we also have forgiven our debtors.
¹³And lead us not into temptation,
   but deliver us from evil.^"


Matthew 6:9-13

oh yeah. thats where I remember it from. In the prayer that Jesus taught the disciples to pray it says "Lead us not into temptation". But how do they connect? In the Lords prayer, Jesus is telling us to pray to the Lord so that we will not be tempted by the evil one. In the passage, Jesus tells his disciples (also us) to stay awake so that we may not be tempted.

aka; he tells us how to pray to not be tempted and how to act to keep from temptation.

But what does stay awake mean?

Stay awake, thrive. Be aware of your surroundings. Jesus didn't want his disciples to fall asleep because He knew that He was about to be handed over to evil. He knew He was about to die. He wanted his disciples there with him, fully alert, fully ready to see the power of God be strengthened by the most powerless act of courage.

"The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak".

We are human (in case you weren't sure. We are.). Therefore, we are weak. We can build up all the adrenaline our bodies can handle but it doesn't mean we are necessarily strong. We, in our human form, are weak when it comes to this kind of stuff. Jesus, in his human form, was weak. He was afraid, but his spirit was willing to complete the prophecy put into place. He hoped his disciples to do the same.

This saying is kind of like a moral code. Its kind of like the famous St. Jerome quote "Practice what you preach". The spirit is our soul. The spirit is our moral compass, and sometimes our flesh, our humanity, causes us to go off of our moral compass. But Christ calls us back on track. Just like Christ pulled the disciples back on track.


Amen.