Sunday, 4 May 2025The theme for this month is ‘Fulfill responsibilities, strive for self-improvement’. I am sure we hear these words on a daily basis: Be responsible, if you are not, then you cannot improve. Yet, there seems to be so many responsibilities as we wear many hats in our lives, so it is not always that easy to do. So how can we do well and fulfill our responsibilities?
Let us start by looking at Jesus. We hear Him say the night before He died to His Father, ‘I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do’. Jesus was sent here on Earth on a mission where he had to show Himself to men and to teach them to accept the word of God and believe in Him. This was to save us man from original sin, the sin of Adam and Eve. This was a huge task, big responsibility. But throughout the challenges that Jesus had in His life to carry out his mission, He stayed focused on this mission. He had a game plan.
In sport, we all know that when we are playing a match, our aim is to win. To do so, we need to have a plan on how to win, the GAME PLAN. But would it be dumb for a coach to have that and not share it. And would it be even more dumb if we have a game plan and never look at it during the game??? We must do so and evaluate how our game plan is going. If things are not going well according to the plan, we need to make changes along the way. Waiting till the end of the game would be dumb as we would have lost by then.
We see this also in Jesus’ life and in fact, the busier Jesus’ life became, the more He would withdraw to desolate places and pray. He also needed the time to check the game plan and see how things are going.
Perhaps we too need to check our game plan and check how we are doing in our lives in carrying out the responsibilities we have as a child of your parents, as a student of this school and as a child of God? Make a commitment to finding some time, perhaps 15 minutes a day to start with and then increasing to an hour a day to see how you are doing in your game plan.
So what then after reflecting on our game plan and seeing if we are carrying out our duties?
Last Sunday I was asked to reflect on the question: what sickness are you most afraid of? I want you to think about this same question too now? Perhaps, in the minds of many we think of things like leukemia, cancer. But for me the answer for myself was blindness.
In fact, when Father asked this question of us, he was also thinking of blindness but not the physical one like the one I was thinking of, he was thinking of the blindness we have in our minds! We might be blind to reality and we are blinded by another HUGE sickness, that of the lack of humility! Being too proud, we may not realise our weaknesses; and we may not be honest to ourselves about whether we are in fact carrying out our duty, our responsibility. We need to be truthful to see if we are really responsible in our lives and we need to have the HUMILITY to say we are not doing so and we need to change.
Father made reference to many stories in the bible to show us the humility of so many of our characters in the bible. Even for Jesus Himself, He demonstrated humility when He knelt and washed the feet of the Apostles. “Know ye what I have done?” He asked them. “I have given you an example, that … the servant is not greater than his lord; neither he that is sent greater than he that sent him.” Jesus was humble in carrying out his responsibilities even though He is higher that all of us here today.
And let us think about our character Simon Peter also known as Cephas and one of our patron saints. Jesus said: “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.” And Simon answered, “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets.” And when they had done this, they enclosed a large number of fish, and their nets were breaking.” Now think about it if Simon Peter were to proud of himself and say, come on Jesus, be serious, I am an expert fisherman, why should I listen to you? Do not forget how tired he was too. Instead, he was humble enough to listen, to carry out his responsibility in spite of his tiredness. He listened to Jesus.
Shungtakians, to fulfill our responsibilities and to grow, we need a game plan, we need a time to reflect and evaluate and we need to be humble enough to see our strengths, our failures and to make changes in our plans so that we can improve in who we are as a child of our parents, a student of this school and as a child of God.
(Some parts of this sharing are inspired by Father Arturo’s Homily)
By Ms Brenda Lee