“This is the will of God, your holiness.” (1 Thes 4:3) Sometimes a short verse of Sacred Scripture gob smacks you early in the morning and shakes you out of the fog and has you sit up and take notice. St. Paul gives us this wake-up call today.

This call to holiness is a personal and profound entry into a relationship that goes beyond the humdrum and into the exciting and breathtaking.

To seek holiness is to seek love and to seek love is to seek God. And this is what God wants. He wants us to seek him but here’s the catch: he is not hiding rather he is pursuing us with fervor and joy. This is why, I believe, prayer and scripture are so important. It is why Sunday Mass is vital to our spiritual life. It is in these moments that we are able to slow down and stop. To put on the brakes and stop running thinking that we are seeking holiness and allowing the holiness of God to surround us.

How does this happen? Maybe it looks a little like this. A father was taking care of his two toddler children one Saturday. All he had to do was watch them, feed them lunch and then put them down for a nap. It all went horribly wrong. By lunch he was frazzled, most of the food prepared was either on the floor, the table or in the hair. As he prepared his children for their nap time the running began the escaping from the crib and the emotional temperature began to rise. At one point the father sat down on the sofa and laid his head back. When his wife came through the door, sitting on the couch was her dozing husband with a sleeping child’s head on each leg.

This can often be our life, where God in his love pursues us as we make the blunders and stumbles of our life where we want our own way and do it our way. We want to be in charge and focused on our pleasure and enjoyment, then God calls us to rest in him. It usually is neither a large clap of thunder nor a voice from the sky but the whisper of peacefulness that invites us to come and just be with him for a moment.

We discover the fullness of God’s call to holiness when we surrender to the joy of just being with God and resting as we do his holy work. It is being the saint that we are created to be were life is never without joy.

God Bless

Fr. Mark