Practice, practice, practice. That’s the name of the game.
Whenever you venture out to start a new hobby or learn a new skill, you have to practice daily in order to get proficient at it. Take for instance, learning to play a new music instrument like the guitar. You need to practice your chords, do finger warm up exercises to help your fingers to become nimble on the guitar fret board for at least 15 minutes each day. When you are a total new beginner at the guitar, start slow with baby steps. If you continue doing that for a month without fail, you will quickly see how much progress you have made. Don’t give up even when it is hard at the beginning and the tips of your fingers gets sore. When the tips of your fingers starts forming calasus, that is a good sign. You are showing determination to master this music instrument and in no time, you will have fun playing your favourite songs and entertaining your family and friends.
Another way to get proficient at your hobby or your skill is showing the right attitude. Attitude is everything. If you have a positive attitude, anything is possible.
When running in a marathon race, you first need to put in hours of daily practice. You need to get yourself fit by doing stretch exercises. Running or jogging around the block for at least 20 minutes daily will give you the right frame of mind to eventually achieve your goal.
What about your spiritual life? Do you also need to practice each day? Of course! Being a follower of Christ means putting others first before yourself. Practising Christianity means to give of yourself to serving Christ in others. This demands sacrifice. When we practice Christianity, we are living out JOY. How do you live out JOY? It is quite simple – Jesus first, then Others, then Yourself. When you live out Christianity in that order, then you are at peace with Christ, others and the world and most of all, you have deep peace within you.
To be a Christian you need to be a light in the darkness. You need to shine the light of Christ within you in your day to day interactions with people. Others must see the light of Christ shining out through you.
You also need to have a deep relationship with Christ through the practice of reading your Bible each day. The Bible is our code of conduct. It teaches us how to behave and how to love God and our neighbour. It teaches us Christ-like qualities to adopt in our lives, like compassion, mercy, kindness, gentleness, forgiveness, justice, and reaching out to the poor. It also teaches us how to be humble. To practice humility in our lives is very powerful because God works best in a humble heart.
1John 2:3-5 And by this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments. Whoever says “I know Him” but does not keep His commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him, but whoever keeps His word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in Him.
As the above piece of Scripture tells us, we need to practice keeping the Commandments of God. If we do not keep His Commandments, how can we say we love God whom we can’t see, yet we hate our neighbours whom we can see? We are not living in the Light of God and His Truth is not in us.
Practising loving God is a vertical effect, i.e a relationship that reaches Heaven between you and God. Practising loving your neighbour is a horizontal effect i.e between you and your neighbour. When you look at the dynamics of this, it symbolises the Cross, vertical and horizontal. The cross therefore, is a bridge and that bridge is Jesus, the only way to the Father.
In Matthew 5:48, Jesus says to His disciples, “Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect”. What does this mean? Can we truly be like God, perfect in all things? I don’t think so. We are weak sinful human beings with flaws. Think of a clay pot that is beautiful and perfect. Nothing can touch it or spoil its beauty and it sits on the shelf not really being useful. But if the pot was cracked and broken, it can be fixed and reshaped again and it can turn out to be more beautiful than it was before. The light shines through the cracks. This is what I think the Lord means when He commands us to be perfect. Even through our imperfections and cracks and brokenness, He can still use us for His glory. His light will shine out through us. This is what being perfect means as a Christian. We need to practice striving each day to be well-rounded, loving and sincere, strong and gentle, kind and forgiving, truthful, sincere and wise, like our Heavenly Father. This takes a life time of practice.
So let us practice each day the teachings of Christ and let us be disciplined by Him as His disciples, in our race towards Perfection, in order to win the prize of eternal life with God.
Sr Columbia Fernandez O.P
13 October 2022