Imagine being told the audit is coming and you have already blown through the budget and squandered the resources. Your stomach drops. You start thinking, not about excuses, but about how to repair what has been damaged. That is the hard reckoning that forces the manager in the parable to act—and it names us. We have all wasted what the Lord placed in our hands: hours scrolled away, skills left idle, chances to love postponed for “later.” Yet the turning point is not in shame. It is in action.
Read MoreExaltation of the Holy Cross
Every medicine cabinet hides a story. Bottles with child‑proof caps, labels we can’t quite pronounce, doses we would rather skip. Bitter cures seldom feel like kindness in the moment. Yet the physician who truly loves us prescribes what heals, not what flatters the tongue.
Sin opened a wound we could not stitch. Death came as the consequence, and it has torn through families, hopes, and every human story. But listen to the strange mercy of God: the punishment becomes the medicine. The wood meant for execution becomes a tree that bears life. The valley of shadows is turned into a doorway. The cross does not decorate suffering; it transforms it.
Read MoreTwenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time
You know the hush that falls when a sunset sets the sky on fire. For a breath, everything stops and you simply receive. Then the colors dim, and the shoreline returns to ordinary. Beauty lets us glimpse God, and then it slips from our grasp. The moment was real, but it was never meant to be owned.
Our families, our plans, even our very lives are like that—astonishing gifts that point beyond themselves. Then comes the sentence that jolts us awake: “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” These words sting because love for family runs deep. Yet the Lord is not commanding contempt; he is unmasking a temptation—to clutch a gift so tightly that we stop seeing the Giver.
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