Sh! It's a Secret!...

“I will give you a new heart and place a new spirit within you, taking from your bodies your stony hearts and giving you natural hearts” Ezekiel 36:26

This past week we celebrated the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. May the Lord be abundantly praised for His heart that is so perfect in mercy and overflowing with love.
In the past month I was sitting around the dinner table of a dear friend of mine and he looked at me seriously and asked, “What is the secret?” He was referring to the secret of being truly happy in the world we live in, of being truly fulfilled. My first response, was explaining to him that it was not a secret! But unfortunately, it was to him because our culture has drowned out the message of Jesus Christ and the implications He can have our lives. What is the secret? I thought you would never ask.

“Yet in all this we are more than conquerors because of him who has loved us.” -Romans 8: 38.
I heard someone say that if you take a look around, young people in our world mostly fall on the extremes of the spectrum when it comes to life. Think about it, you have the people who repress and deny the truth of who they are because of indifference or fear, and then you have others who might indulge themselves in their desires looking for something more. What extreme are you on? Our culture has done such a great job at convincing us that we need to repress or indulge our desires and beliefs, only leading us to take an unhealthy and unbalanced approach to life. When we operate in the extremes of our desires in life, we miss what we were made for, what the Lord longs to give us.

My friends, middle ground in life is where the answer is. Between indulging our desires and beliefs and repressing them is REDEMPTION. Jesus came to redeem us! And when we look to the desires of our hearts and that we are not happy repressing them or indulging in them, we see that Jesus is waiting for us to come to him with our “stony hearts” ready to transform us and truly redeem our hearts in Him. From Him we receive hearts of flesh, hearts that can be loved, molded, and renewed from the way of the world.

Here is the great news! There is no secret to happiness. There is not equation to figure out or puzzle to complete to recognize what it takes to be happy. Authentic happiness comes when we let the Lord redeem us. It comes when we let the redeeming love of Christ into our lives and allow him to be our all, our everything. Through prayer, the Holy Eucharist, Confession, and the other sacraments, we encounter the redemption of Christ in our world. We must put ourselves in place where we can come face to face with the Jesus who died for us and rose from the dead. He came to redeem us! He came to give us life, a life that does not repress or indulge but a life that truly renews and transforms all who are open to it.

Lets your hearts be changed by Jesus! Redemption is at hand my friends…

God Bless You,
Rusty