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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.

Mary, whats your faith like?

 My faith can probably be described in a few words.

For one, it’s ongoing. I will never be able to dive deep enough into my faith because it’s a never-ending pool. I am constantly learning and growing, deepening my knowledge about scripture and the Lord. Over the past year I have come to yearn for a deeper knowledge of what I, on a daily basis, call my faith. Which brings me to my next word.

My faith is a struggle. A constant struggle that I believe will last for the rest of my life. Probably because I’m human (well, definitely because I’m human). I used to try and deny my struggle, saying things like my faith is awesome and Jesus is my best friend. Over the past years I’ve tried to be honest with myself about my faith and the most honest answer I discerned about was that it’s a struggle. I have trouble believing in things I can’t understand. The Catholic faith is called a mystery. Although a struggle, this past week at youth group kind of opened my eyes to something. I was asked to speak on the Eucharist and I was reading different stories in the Gospels. I read John 6:60-68 (which is quickly becoming one of my favorite passages ever!) which, and I quote, says:

“Many, therefore, of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, ‘This is a hard saying; who can hear it?’ When Jesus knew in himself that his disciples murmured at it, he said unto them, ‘Does this offend you?...’ From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him. Then Jesus said to the twelve, ‘Will you also go away?’ Then Simon Peter answered him, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go?  You have the words of eternal life.’”

 I get a lot from this passage. Mostly, however, that this passage kind of describes my faith. They’re talking about the Eucharist as a hard concept, hard to understand, therefor hard to believe. The people who came from all ends of the earth to see him had trouble understanding and many left. His best friends, the 12, had trouble understanding. But when Jesus asked his 12 “Will you go away also?” will you leave too? Simon Pete said “Whom shall we go?”. I read this and my faith, in a way, made sense. My faith is a struggle because Catholicism is full of hard concepts and I don’t always understand them. I have learned, however, that I’m not called to understand them, just to believe in them. If I don’t believe in what is so clearly written for me, what has been so clearly passed down for me, then where else would I go?