Jesus Calls Us To Follow Him Week 9: He is Waiting for My Decision

Jesus Calls Us to Follow Him
Week 9   He is Waiting for My Decision
 
Opening Prayer
Lord Jesus, we praise You.  You are wise.  In Your perfect plan, You invite us into Your life.  You lovingly seek us in our daily lives and offer us the free gift of a relationship with You. 
Forgive us for the times we’ve failed to recognize and respond to Your call in our lives.  In Your Scripture You tell us, “It was not you who chose Me, but I who chose you.” (John 15:16)  Thank you for choosing us and inviting us into the adventure of following You.  Help us to know, not just with our head but with our whole being, that You seek each one of us and call us to follow You as Your faithful disciples.  Lord, give us the desire and dedication to follow You with all our hearts.  Jesus, we trust in You.  We make this prayer in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
AMEN
 
Reflection
From Holy Longing by Ronald Rolheiser
 
For most of us, our relationship with Jesus is one of hero-worship:  we admire Him and see Him as a model to be imitated.  But this is not enough.  What Jesus wants from us is not admiration, and not even imitation, though it is far easier to admire figures of great morality and courage than to do what they do.  No, what Jesus really wants of us is that we undergo His presence so as to enter into a community of life and celebration with Him.  Jesus, as John Shea says, is not a law to be obeyed or a model to be imitated, but a presence to be seized and acted upon.
 
With great love, Jesus has found you and called you.  He is waiting for your decision. 

 
What does it mean to you to undergo Jesus’ presence?  What does a community of life and celebration with Jesus look like? 
 
 
In those times when you have undergone Jesus’ presence, in what way did you seize His presence and act upon it?
 

Jesus has found you and is calling you.  In what way are you being invited into a deeper relationship with Him?
 
 
What is holding you back?
 
 
Praying with Tradition
CCC, #520 - 521
Jesus calls us to follow Him
 
520
In all of His life Jesus presents Himself as our model.  He is “the perfect man,” who invites us to become His disciples and follow Him.  In humbling Himself, He has given us an example to imitate, through His prayer He draws us to pray, and by His poverty He calls us to accept freely the privation and persecutions that may come our way.
 
521
Christ enables us to live in Him all that He Himself lived, and He lives it in us.  “By His incarnation, He, the Son of God, has in a certain way united Himself with each man.”  We are called not only to become one with Him, for He enables us as the members of His Body to share in what He lived for us in His flesh as our model:
 
We must continue to accomplish in ourselves the stages of Jesus’ life and His mysteries and often to beg Him to perfect and realize them in us and in His whole Church…For it is the plan of the Son of God to make us and the whole Church partake in His mysteries and to extend them to and continue them in us and in His whole Church.  This is His plan for fulfilling His mysteries in us.
 
 
What strikes you from this passage?

 
How does this connect with what we already talked about in Scripture?
 
 
Closing Prayer
 
It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
 
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
 
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
 
                                                                                          Praying by Mary Oliver