World at Prayer blog
Reflections of Family and Faith
"The family that prays together stays together." - Venerable Patrick Peyton
Today in our gospel we have two points to reflect on during the day. First, we hear Jesus tell us about the need for each one of us to “carry our own Cross”, and second, we hear him tell us that if anyone wants to save his or her life, he or she must be willing to “lose it.”
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Today we celebrate Ash Wednesday, the day we start 40 days of reorienting our lives to focus on God as the center. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches us that in this season of Lent we are invited to purify our hearts, seek the love of God, re-learn that true happiness is not found in riches, in human fame, in power, or in human achievement; rather true happiness is found in God alone (CCC 1723). Through the ancient practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, we will avail ourselves to God, and demonstrate to Him our desire for repentance and renewal, so as to make Him the center of our lives.
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Healing the family | Love thy Neighbor
While growing up, I had an uncle named Ignatius Buuka, who was blind. He lived with us at home. He was a jolly, hardworking man whom we loved, and whose company we enjoyed a lot. He passed on in the late 1990s.
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As you heard last week, I just came back from visiting Bangladesh and the mission there. Bangladesh is a beautiful country, with many rivers teeming with fish, and diverse peoples and cultures. I have never eaten such an amount of rice and fish curry in my entire life. As the joke goes in Bangladesh, “Rice and curry in the morning, and curry and rice in the evening.” That is how they change their diet.
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Many years ago, the country that we currently know as Southern Sudan did not exist. It was part of the greater Sudan. The northern and southern Sudan are culturally and religiously different. The north is predominantly Arab and Muslim, and the south is predominantly Sub-Saharan African, and largely Christian. These cultural and religious differences became triggers of long-term conflicts between the north and the south of Sudan. Many Southern Sudanese ended up growing up in refugee camps in Uganda and the neighboring countries.
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“Come to me all of you who labor and are burdened - I will give you rest” We have all gone through seasons when we felt overwhelmed or exhausted by things that were going on in our lives. This might have been brought about by challenging circumstances in our personal lives, in our family, in our friendships, in our workplace, in clubs to which we belong, in our neighborhood, in our Church, in our country, or in our world. Times when we laid down to rest at night, and sleep wouldn’t come. Times when we turned and twisted in our bed half the night. Times when we woke up, our heart racing and our head pounding about the same things.
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