Build Me A Chapel...Amen

Jesus said to his disciples:                                                                      

"No one can serve two masters.

He will either hate one and love the other

or be devoted to one and despise the other.

You cannot serve God and mammon.

"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink,

or about your body, what you will wear.

Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?  Look at the birds in the sky;

they do not sow or reap, they gather nothing into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are not you more important than they? Learn from the way the wildflowers grow. They do not work or spin. But I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was clothed like one of them.

One of my favorite movies is Lilies of the Field which is a story about an ordinary man, Homer Smith and a group of sisters that have just arrived on our shores in order to set up a convent and a church.  Homer is making his way across the United States and picking up odd jobs here and there.  He happens across these nuns and makes a small repair for them assuming that in the morning Mother Maria will pay him and he can be on his way.  What follows is a struggle between Mother Maria and Homer and she eventually convinces him to build her a chapel.  Homer goes to work building a church for her but soon the money runs out and the work comes to a stop. The people of the area start arriving, each bringing a brick or two or a dozen, whatever they can afford and eventually the chapel is built.  In between times Homer and the nuns develope a beautiful relationship.  Homer takes a job running heavy machinery for a contracting company in town and surprises the nuns with food treats that their budget will not normally allow.  Through it all, the movie portrays a nun believing in the Gospel in that God will provide and Homer who leaves the nuns with just a little more faith than when he arrived.  It is a beautiful movie with a marvelous message, the same message Jesus is giving us in today's reading. 

We as Catholic Christians should learn to trust more in God and less in ourselves. Look at Mother Angelica of EWTN.  She had no idea on how to run a TV station or produce a show.  Yet today, her station is the largest Catholic communications empire that has ever been seen.  She did it depending on God and at times in spite of the bishops who started a rival network that was less than successful.  Her secret was to trust in God. She speaks of times when there were only a few dollars in the checking account, yet when it was needed, the funds did arrive. She trusted and God rewarded her trust. 

We certainly cannot sit in our easy chair and wait for God to meet our every earthly need.  Sometimes he provides the opportunity that will allow us to earn what we need to do what we want to do and other times He will make what we need appear seemingly out of nowhere.  Our job is to do the footwork and trust in God to make it come out with the proper result. 

But sometimes, things do not happen as we would like them to happen.  An opportunity appears and vanishes before we have the wherewithal to take advantage of it or we have to pass something by because we just cannot do it with the resources at hand.  This may be an occasion where the Lord is telling us to "wait."  At these times we have to trust that God knows what He is doing and we just have to wait for His will to become known and His will to be done. 

Get a taste of what the movie was like by clicking here.