Living WORD 

Points for Reflection: I am sharing to my dear readers these stories which I have collected to help you reflect as the Universal Church celebrates the 16th SUNDAY in OT – A. Here they are:

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# 1. A Catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi, and a Protestant minister happened to die at the same time. All three appeared at the pearly gates, but had to wait in a long line. Suddenly a taxi driver joined them. But St. Peter beckoned him to come to the head of the line.

The three clergymen could not understand.

Finally the priest went up to St. Peter and asked, “How come that taxi driver gets to go in ahead of us? You know taxi drivers … And you also know we three men of the cloth have been preaching all our lives, trying to keep people out of hell.”

St. Peter smiled, “I know. I know. But … this taxi driver has scared hell out of more people in one week than you three have in your entire lives.” (Msgr. Arthur Tonne, FEAR OF HELL) ++++

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# 2. The estate of the Duke of Devonshire in England contains many priceless paintings and is open to the public. One day a group of people were moving through the spacious rooms admiring the paintings. One woman never spoke a word but would repeatedly go close to a picture and examine it very carefully. After the tour someone asked what she thought of it all.

“It was perfect,” she said, with real enthusiasm. “I could not find a speck of dust anywhere.”

How often we miss the beauty of life because we are so intent on looking for faults. (SEEING DIRT, Uplift) ++++

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# 3. One day the local pastor was making his parish rounds and visited with an elderly man who was not a good churchgoer. He excused himself with the old explanation that he said his prayers at home and did not need a congregation around him.

As they sat around an open fireplace and talked about many things, the pastor took one of the brightly burning twigs out of the flames and set it aside on the edge of the fireplace.

Gradually as they talked, the twig’s flame became merely a glowing ember and then eventually it went out At that the pastor looked the parishioner in the eye and put the ember back into the fire …

He got the message. (SUNDAY SERVICE, Christopher Notes) ++++

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# 4. One day the devil felt particularly gratified, for he had just come up with a real winner. He had made a mirror that had the unusual quality of badly distorting anything seen in it. The nicest face become unbelievably ugly; the nicest landscape became like cooked green leaf. When someone with a good thought smiled and looked into the mirror, the devil saw in it a grin or grimace.

The devil’s understudies delighted in their master’s success. He turned the whole world upside down with it. So then he got the idea of flying up to heaven to make fun of the angels and even God himself with that mirror. The nearer he got to heaven, the more the devil grinned. His grin reflected so horribly in the mirror that it slipped out of his hands and fell back to earth and broke into a thousand pieces.

But this caused even more trouble than before. For the mirror broke into pieces as fine as the grains of sand, and blew about all over the earth. Whenever a grain got into a person’s eye, it could not be removed; and that person thereafter always saw only the bad side, the evil in things and persons around. (Hans Christian Andersen) ++++

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# 5. Just take two of them as a sample: Matthew and Simon the Zealot. Matthew, being a tax-collector, was, in Jewish eyes, a traitor and a renegade. Simon was just the opposite. As a Zealot he was a fanatical nationalist, who was sworn to assassinate every traitor and every Roman he could.

It was one of the miracles of Christ that two people as different as these could live and work together. This divergence in a Christian community is commonplace today …

It is said of G.K.. Chesterton and his brother Cecil, “They always argued; they – never quarrelled.” (Barclay, APOSTLES: A STRANGE MIXTURE) ++++

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# 6. Years ago a magazine carried a moving story. It concerned a retired lay missionary and hiswife. They spent their final days on a tiny farm outside a town.

The couple worked hard growing vegetables and chickens. They couldn’t eat all they grew, so they sold their surplus to the townspeople.

After a while the townspeople began to gossip about how miserly the retired missionary and his wife were. “They weigh every vegetable and they count every egg twice,” said one townsman. “They wouldn’t give you an extra potato or an extra egg to save themselves. I wonder what kind of missionaries they were.”

Eventually the missionary’s wife died. Only then did the real truth come out. Every cent the couple earned from selling their vegetables and eggs went to two elderly widows who depended on them for their sole support.

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My friends in Jesus, today’s readings from the Holy Scripture provided us with a very powerful message. The First Reading from the Book of Wisdom spoke of God’s righteousness. The Second Reading from the Letter to the Romans spoke of the intercession of the Holy Spirit on behalf of the children of God. The last Reading from Gospel of Matthew announced how, at the end of the age, the children of God will be separated from the children of the evil one.