Scripture Scribbles: April 20, 2025 The Resurrection of the Lord
They “saw and believed.” Jesus is risen! Believe in the Resurrection, the most important mystery of our faith, the central teaching of Christianity. More than 500 people saw Jesus alive and were willing to undergo torture and die rather than deny this truth. When challenged to investigate Jesus’ Resurrection, once skeptic Sir Lionel Luckhoo (the most successful attorney in the world) after his extensive investigation concluded, “I say unequivocally that the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is so overwhelming that it compels acceptance by proof which leads absolutely no room for doubt.”
Scripture Scribbles: April 13, 2025
We have arrived. Holy Week. A week of contemplation as the greatest love story unfolds and spirals. We begin Mass with Jesus entering Jerusalem and everyone praising him as the Messiah. Quickly turning sour, the Pharisees influence the people and we encounter Jesus’ Passion. We know the ending and it grieves us and then gives us Hope.
This season of Lent has shown me a particularly intense lens on suffering. Not just my own suffering, but the witness of other people’s sufferings. My heart ached as I went to two funerals in a week. The news of multiple friends whose families were ill for months on end while other families await a miracle to heal very sick children rattled my being…
Scripture Scribbles: April 6, 2025
This Gospel is showing us how His mercy is offered to us, all of us!
We are infinitely loved, by God the Father. This woman caught in adultery was infinitely loved. Her accusers were infinitely loved!
Has this passage become too familiar?? Has it lost the heaviness that we should be feeling when we read it? I think it did for me. Is it because we know the end? We know Jesus shows her mercy, and we don’t let ourselves feel the weight of this moment? For me, this week, there it is, my assigned Gospel for my Scribble reflection. It is different when I am attempting to share my feelings about what the Gospels are saying to me.
Scripture Scribbles: March 30, 2025
I have been wrestling these past couple of weeks. In my prayer journal, I’ve scribbled page after page of prayers, thoughts and questions about things that have been hard and things I don’t understand. I have wondered, in my prayer scribbles, about God’s mercy for me, about the temporal consequences of sin and about his will, among other things.
It has been a time of deep honesty and closeness with the Lord (see Rachel’s beautiful devotion from last week’s first Scrutiny Gospel). It has been exhausting, too, because alongside the heart-to-hearts with Jesus, I have also been trying to figure it all out.
Scripture Scribbles: March 23, 2025
It’s okay to wrestle with God.
I am not sure where or how this lie originated in my heart, but I have found myself continually falling back into this trap in different ways throughout my spiritual journey and walk with the Lord.
It is okay to openly, honestly, have it out with God. Not only is it okay, it is good.
You can tell Him things don’t make sense. When things are hard, when you are confused, when you’re struggling with a Church teaching, or seeking the next step in a difficult situation—Tell God!
Scripture Scribbles: March 16, 2025
The gospel today is about Jesus’ transfiguration. It is among my favorite Biblical accounts and yet it never ceases to baffle me each time it is read in the yearly liturgical cycle. But then I realized something essential today. I don’t need to understand everything. We, as God’s children, don’t need to discern, comprehend, decipher, decode, or grasp every single word we read in the Bible. The others, we only need to know and acknowledge them as God’s miracles and mysteries. This is how our faith works.
Scripture Scribbles: March 9, 2025
Lucifer’s greatest ammunition: those that don’t believe he exists. Demons are everywhere, and they hate you. There are demons assigned to closely watch each and every individual and tempt at your weakest point. My eyes widened as I listened to Father Mark Beard’s homily – “Interview with an Exorcist.” Solidly aware of Satan's existence, how do I fight?=
Scripture Scribbles: March 2, 2025
Recently, my students and I have been reading Venerable Fulton Sheen’s Victory Over Vice, which focuses on the seven deadly sins, the last words of Christ, and the virtues that overcome these vices. We landed on Pride this past week. Whew! How prideful we can all be! What struck me in the chapter was the danger of intellectual pride - a pride that assumes we know all we need to know…
Scripture Scribbles: February 23, 2025
Imagine living this way…Imagine the freedom we would feel if we could start from this moment on, living with radical mercy? The way Jesus lived, the way Jesus loved. Would this set us apart? Would people notice if our love for others was radical and forgiving? What stings a little when I read these really hard words, is Jesus saying,
“And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you?”
It's easy to love our family, it's easy to love those who love us….that's the easy part. One of the things I like to remind my kids is, we were made to do hard things, I was made to do hard things. We were not made to only do the easy, the comfortable, the “expected.” We were made to do hard things, and this “thing” that Jesus is asking us, is HARD!
Scripture Scribbles: February 16, 2025
Mother Teresa said, “Pain and suffering have come into your life, but remember pain, sorrow, suffering are but the kiss of Jesus—a sign that you have come so close to Him that He can kiss you.” And his kiss is the sweetest. Even as the horror of the crucifixion unfolds. He invites me to be with him there. To open my own sufferings to him. In the nakedness is total trust. In the agony is redemptive power. In his death my belovedness is sealed. And in the resurrection my joy is complete.
Scripture Scribbles: February 9, 2025
He gets into Simon’s boat, but He continues to preach to the crowd nearby. Notably, not to Simon directly. I can’t help but laugh at this, as I realize the ways God speaks to me in my life. Is he trying to get your attention somehow, maybe by being in your boat but speaking to the “crowd”? Close enough so you can hear, but not a direct ask of you just yet?
Scripture Scribbles: February 2, 2025
Simeon, a devout and righteous man and Anna, a prophetess, foretold the future of the child Jesus and oh, how accurate were their prophecies!
Now we don’t need to be devout, righteous, or gifted with fortune-telling abilities to talk so beautifully about Jesus or God. We only need to look at our lives and God’s blessings. These are enough reasons to praise, glorify, and adore our Lord through our words and our deeds…
Scripture Scribbles: January 26, 2025
Jesus came “to bring glad tidings to the poor … to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free…” I am poor, continually in need of being replenished with spiritual nourishment. I am captive by worldly attachments, categorized by Bishop Barron as wealth, power, honor, and pleasure. Wealth: my desire for things and financial security. Power: wanting to be in control of my life and others. Honor: my desire to be loved and affirmed by family. Pleasure: desiring comfort, avoiding self denial, mortification, and sacrifice; having an inordinate desire for sensual delights, good food, ice cream, and sweets…
Scripture Scribbles: January 12, 2025 - The Baptism of the Lord
The Baptism of the Lord. The “official” end of the Christmas season. As we enter into Ordinary Time, I want to linger here. Maybe because I haven’t quite finished celebrating Christmas with my family yet. This year was the first in 17 Christmases that all six of our kids haven't been under the same roof for Christmas morning. Maybe I want to linger here because we started pulling out our Christmas decorations a lot closer to Christmas Eve than usual and I'm not ready to pack it all up…
Scripture Scribbles: January 5, 2025 - The Epiphany of the Lord
Then you shall be radiant at what you see, your heart shall throb and overflow…Those words leapt off the page of the missal and they actually hurt as they landed in my heart. They felt like a promise that was for me somehow, but also so impossibly inaccessible from where I sat alone in the pew on that cold day in January at the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Denver.
Scripture Scribbles: December 29, 2024
Have you ever felt like you’ve lost Jesus in life?
Perhaps you even thought He was still with you, as you soldiered on ahead forging your own way. Making your own decisions about a particular situation or life goal. Maybe, once you felt a hint of concern that you may have lost Him you started looking for traces of Him in your friends or family, to try to confirm your decisions or the path you started down. Or maybe it isn’t until reading this right now that you’ve realized you’ve lost Jesus in your life, or in a certain part of your heart.
If this describes you or your situation in any way, let’s consider what happens next in the story:
Mary and Joseph begin to retrace their steps in order to find Jesus.
Scripture Scribbles: December 22, 2024
So many characters in the Bible gave us precise examples of obedience and faithfulness. Among them are Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Jesus, and Mary. Now is indeed the season of joy and thanksgiving because it’s Christmas. In a few days, we will be celebrating the nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ. However, I’d like to pay homage to our Blessed Virgin Mary today. Especially today…
Scripture Scribbles: December 15, 2024
“… I am not worthy to loosen the thongs of His sandals…” John the Baptist humbly enlightened. “Pride is always going to be there,” I confessed. “You need to dig deeper to get at the root to improve,” Fr. Dan gently exhorted. A few phrases immediately jumped out in the Litany of Humility: the fear of being wronged, the fear of suffering rebukes, and the desire of being loved. Scripture and the saints provided additional wisdom. “If we were truly humble, nothing would change us... If someone were to criticize us, we would not feel discouraged...” (St. Mother Theresa) “Perfect love casts out fear.” (1 John 4:18) My love and that of others was not perfect. Desiring to be loved imperfectly by looking to other people and things wouldn’t satisfy.
Scripture Scribbles: December 8, 2024
Recently, we celebrated the Baptism of our fifth child. As Catholic parents, through infant Baptism, we take on the promise to prepare the hearts and souls of our children for the Kingdom of Heaven. Not an easy task! We often desire to make their paths straight, mountains low, and rough ways smooth on our own accord; however, in our Baptisms we are called to deeper conversion and surrender to allow the Holy Spirit guide us in our parenting and lives. Suffering will happen for us and our children and the surrender is oh so difficult.