Rejoice!

“Rejoice with me for I have found the coin that I lost!” Luke 15:9

What a relief it is when we find something valuable we have been looking for! Yesterday, one of my staff asked me if I threw away a rotten wallet and I said I had. He then showed me what he found inside, a couple of credit cards I had been searching for!!! I realized what a crazy person I was and thanked God He surrounded me with people who took care of me! 

The three parables in the 15th chapter of Luke shows us just how much our God loves us. He searches for the lost, even when we reject him. My new favorite conversion story is about Charlie Rich who grew up a devout Hasidic Jew in a small village in Hungary in 1899. His family emigrated to the United States and ended up living in a New York ghetto. Although he was very religious, he found it impossible to keep his faith in the noise and busyness of the city. He became an atheist and tried to kill himself three times. He did not succeed. One day when he was around thirty years old, he went inside a Catholic Church to escape the heat. He looked up at one of the stained glass windows which depicted Jesus stilling the waters. 

“If only it were true,” he said to himself. And he hears this voice answering him, “It is all true.” He became a Jesuit, and spent the rest of his life as a contemplative praying before the Blessed Sacrament for 12 or more hours a day. He wrote, “I have, since my baptism and 1st communion, acquired a happiness which I will not exchange for anything in the world.”

Several books of his writings and sayings have been published. This is one of my favorites: “You must convert everything into prayer, like throwing scraps, by themselves useless, into a stew and making the stew richer. Every insignificant thing – turn it into prayer.”

Indeed, there is so much riches, happiness and peace in our faith. Let us never lose our way, but we can be sure that our Father will look for us and find us if we do. 

Original altered by Prisma app