Tuesday of the Eighth Week in Ordinary Time (May 29, 2018): How is God stretching you?

In the Gospel reading today, Jesus says, “There is no one who has given up home, brothers or sisters, mother or father, children or property, for me and for the Gospel who will not receive in this present age a hundred times more….”

Do you believe that God is more generous than you could ever be? As Christians, whenever we hold back from being generous, it’s probably because we’re afraid that God is not going to be generous to us.

I know. I’ve wrestled with this myself. In August of 2009 when I hired the first employee for Good News Ministries, I was both excited about it and nervous. In my heart, I knew I could trust God to keep providing the extra funding this would require. But would more donors be willing to serve God by helping me with this added expense? The following December, during our annual fundraising appeal, one of my readers offered to completely sponsor that staff member’s salary. Praise the Lord!

And the lesson keeps growing: Since then, the staff has multiplied and God has continued to provide support for personnel, equipment, and office space through the generosity of readers who champion the difference we are making in people’s hearts for the Kingdom of God. Our motto is: Jesus leads, Grace provides.

Does this mean it’s become easy for me to trust God? Not at all! God keeps stretching me as Good News Ministries continues to grow and our outreach continues to expand and our technology tools continue to need support and upgrades.

What distrust or worry has God asked you to give up? All letting go is hard. The root reason is this: We’re afraid that God won’t replace what we lose, yet he wants to give us even more! Or else we’re insisting that we get back what we’ve lost, while God wants us to fill that hole with new, different blessings.

I began to learn this in the early 1980s when I was the leader of a prayer group and the editor of the monthly Charismatic Renewal newsletter for my diocese. God wanted me to give up both ministries so that I could take better care of myself during my second pregnancy, but that didn’t make sense, because no one else in the prayer group was willing to lead and no one at the newsletter had the editorial skills that I had. After weeks of refusing to believe that God really did want me to quit, I noticed that the problems created by my not quitting were getting larger. I decided to trust God’s advice.

As a result, my new-found free time evolved into writing articles that were published in Christian magazines. Just as I’d expected, the prayer group fell apart, but something new and better grew up in its place. And God sent a new editor to the newsletter who did a better job than I had done.

We need Spirit-filled discernment to identify what God wants us to give up when it’s time to let go of it. Then we must trust Jesus as we accept the changes. Such trust always rewards us with new adventures, new paths, new friends, new ministries, and new blessings that are a hundred times better than what we’ve given up.

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Lord Jesus, strengthen my faith to place all my trust in You and to believe in Your promises of blessings for my life. I want to be faithful to You, both in joy and in hardships. Amen.