Second Saturday of the Great Fast: All Souls Saturday; Our Venerable Father and Confessor Theophanes of Sigriana (817); Our Holy Father Gregory the Dialogist, Pope of Rome (604)
Hebrews 3:12-16; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-17; Mark 1:35-44; John 5:24-30
Great Fast Day 13.
Read Mark 1:35-44
Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
In our gospel today we see the importance of prayer. Our Lord makes it a priority to spend time with His Heavenly Father, even to the point of not being immediately available to His disciples who are searching for Him. What is the result of this? Christ is able to carry on His mission of preaching, teaching and healing throughout all of Galilee.
How often, especially in cases where we are responding to tragedies that require our immediate attention as the current time in Ukraine calls for, does our time with the Lord get displaced? The secret of Christian love is that we are in fact loving our neighbors not with our own broken and inadequate love, but with the Father’s perfect love throughus. What we have is finite, what the Lord can give, through us, if we let Him, – infinite!
Imagine your life as a toothpaste tube. If it is simply open at one end all the toothpaste will soon be squeezed out and you will have no more to give- “pastoral burnout” or “compassion fatigue.” Now imagine the tube is opened at both ends and we receive and give freely what we receive. Prioritising our time with the Lord through prayer is in fact the first and most important step to being productive in our spiritual lives, works of charity and humanitarian efforts. Let us receive and share the Lord’s perfect love instead of simply relying on our own!