What’s holding you back?

As we work at building up our faith and our personal connection to Christmas, we need a better understanding of our calling to give birth to Christ in partnership with Mary and the Holy Spirit. We need to get more in touch with how and why we can succeed at spreading the Good News more fully into the world, which so desperately needs him. For this purpose, we can use today’s first reading to uncover what’s still holding us back:

1. How is your life like a desert, dry and lifeless except for a few prickly cactuses? 

2.Are you thirsty for more of God? In what area of your life do you feel parched?

3. Are you feeble in your attempts to become a better evangelizer? 

4.Are your knees weak as your travel the difficult road of holy living?

5. Are you controlled and paralyzed by fear? Any fear — even the smallest one — paralyzes us from moving ahead into the success that awaits us. 6.How are you blind? Are you unable to recognize the talents, knowledge and wisdom you have that God wants you to use for taking Christ to others? 

7.What has God been telling you that you can’t hear? Maybe it’s his guidance? Or his love song that he sings to you? Or his dreams for you? 8.What part of giving Christ to others is too difficult for you? What lame excuses are you using to sit down and do nothing? 

9.How has fear kept your tongue silent when you could be sharing a story about your faith life? Or what have you been saying that’s so unlike Jesus that you give a bad impression of who Jesus really is? 

10.In what areas of your life are the jackals who tempt you still lurking, keeping you from being a good witness of what Jesus is really like? 

11.In what ways do you act foolishly? What the world considers wise the Lord knows to be foolish. What worldly wisdom is holding you back from imitating Jesus? 

12.How are you like a lion? Is there anyone you’ve been devouring with unkind words or impatience or contempt or bullying instead of giving them the unconditional love of Jesus? 

Well, the Good News is, as Isaiah points out: The Lord has ransomed us! Today’s Gospel reading reveals that Jesus was overflowing with God’s power so that he could minister to people. He wants to minister to you, too. We all need this help to fulfill our calling as evangelizers. It’s Jesus who strengthens the hands that are feeble and the knees that are weak. We are like the paralytic who allowed his friends to lower him to Jesus for a healing. By humbling ourselves and allowing Christian friends to help us, we reach the power of Christ. And then he says to us, “My friend, your sins are forgiven.” With that Word, we are healed. With that Word, all the good things that Isaiah prophesied are becoming true for us.

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