Persevere to New Beginnings

My favorite month of the year is May. Spring is in full swing, it's my birthday month, also it is the month of the Blessed Virgin Mary and this year we have an entire month to celebrate the Easter season. And Easter symbolizes the most beautiful and miraculous event of our Lord Jesus persevering and leading us all to new beginnings.

May is bringing new beginnings for me in many ways. I am now living in new quarters with new people in the Miami area. I also begin my last full week residing here. Too, my life soon will begin anew as I return to my home, my friends and my life.

This week will also be the beginning of transitioning my work here to those whose job it is to turn the wheels of justice. There is peace in knowing I did everything I could to further the cause. Both in my small personal example and in our recent national and global example when we finally captured Osama Bin Laden, we see how perseverance eventually leads us to new beginnings.

However, there are always more reasons as to why the Lord takes you places than just one. It just seem to be HIS awesome way. What remains ahead, I can only speculate on. Yet, it is precisely this mystery that invites surrender, joy and wonder.

My new beginnings this week are in large part brought about by the Lord reteaching me some fundamental principles. Two of those principles include humility and surrender. Last week I took some leaps of faith and found that God addressed my concerns and questions before I had much time to even consider them. For example, some evidence that had eluded me ended with an attorney calling me to make arrangements that were most convenient for me to pickup the documents. Another is some financial risk was mitigated by a delay I had not planned. Even simple things such as what to do next after Church, helping a new friend celebrate her birthday and finding time to write this blog just fell into place.

However, the most poignant principle I was retaught this week was the principle that sin comes from within. The most chaotic event, which finally resolved itself, was learning that sexual sin has no boundaries. It is no respecter of persons and can affect the old as well as the young.

Our secular world defines our sexuality as purely a hormonal/physical impulse that primarily affects younger people and is a chaotic mess that has a will of its own. However, our sexuality, which is one of the greatest expressions of love we can experience, begins it's distortion in our thoughts. The more our thoughts entertain, encourage and illicit sexual connections that are based on fantasy, the more divorced your sexuality is from reality. Lustful thoughts may randomly come and arouse us physically. But they have nowhere to go if we shift our focus and invite grace to come in. The more grace enters and changes our heart to love the less those lustful thoughts arise and have fertile ground to grow. Even if we stumble on occasion, the sin has no lasting hold if we embrace God's grace. Our perseverance in rejecting the tempter yields to more grace.

On the flip side if we hold on to lustful thoughts, entertain them and encourage them, the next steps are self evident. After arousal we are led to act. Often masturbation comes first and from there acting out on the "object" of our desire. Objectifying a person is the antithesis of love. What sows in our heart is the life we will end up leading. And the longer we have lived our life embracing this destructive path, the more powerless we are to control it when the next person comes that triggers our entrenched pathways. How sad. We can end up being an 88 year old acting out impulsively, humiliating ourselves, the person who incredulously rejects our advances, and our loved ones. The sinful thought that we began entertaining long ago has born some ugly fruit.

However as we learned last week, even in the ugliest of circumstances God can surprise us by turning it into something beautiful. This is especially true if we follow His will. As we begin this new month of May, let us remember that the more we persevere in His will the greater the chance we have of allowing God's grace and love to spring us into new beginnings.