What’s the biggest attachment which you find most difficult to let go of? - Daily Reflections February 27,2014

WHAT COMPLETES YOU?

 

What are the things you can’t live without? I suppose the list is endless. There are many things without which we would feel incomplete. We cannot live without a computer, Internet or cable TV, but these things also have taken so much of our time. We have less time to pray and less quality time with our families; we become less interactive and less receptive to the needs of other people. Something fills our lives but something is also taken away.

       We cannot live without money. We all need it, but to some it has become the very reason for existence. Some people would do everything for money. And then there are influential people who cannot live without power. They want to perpetuate themselves in power while the poor have become used to living as mere subjects to local royalties.

       If any of these things cause us to sin, we have become slaves. They never did complete us. On the other hand, they have rendered us spiritually disabled. Thus, the Lord’s drastic stand: Cut them off. It’s better for us to enter heaven incomplete than throw our souls to hell.

       In our quest for a better life, we are trapped in the devil’s net. In our desire to be complete, we drift away from God. Our life will never be complete apart from and without Him. Longing for Him and eliminating things that hinder our full relationship with Him is the sure way to experience completeness. No matter how difficult it is to give up certain perks and luxuries, we will only get to know God and what it means to be complete when we have nothing, long for nothing, and know nothing but God!

       In the absence of all these, when they are cut off in our lives, we become desperate. Philip Yancey writes in The Jesus I Never Knew, “We are all desperate and that is, in fact, the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute Grace.” Only He can complete us! Fr. Erick Y. Santos, OFS

 

REFLECTION QUESTION: What’s the biggest attachment which you find most difficult to let go of?

 

Lord Jesus, own me as I own You and You alone. Complete me.