The associated reading for this reflection can be found in your Every Sacred Sunday Mass journal or online here.
There are times when it feels like we are waging culture and spiritual wars on today’s digital landscape. By speaking up for our faith we run the risk of being unfriended or unfollowed. We have to a choice on how we let others’ opinions affect us and potentially lose our social media status.
I find myself wanting to jump right into these debates. If I make the right comment, then I will have dropped the gospel bomb. However, St. Paul writes that “Christ...encourage[s] our hearts and strengthen[s] them in every good deed and word.” Yes, our words, our impassioned appeals to the Truth are important but the Lord offers us his grace to encourage our hearts in our words and deeds.
Jesus desires to “encourage our hearts and strengthen them” through his own heart, his own love. His love can be brave, upfront and aimed at calling those in the temple marketplace to task. But, more regularly, his love is seen in his every day words and deeds. His heart is shown in tender compassion, patience, and humility. This love takes a specific kind of bravery that can put aside the ego, the self, that doesn’t draw any attention. It’s a kind of bravery that can only be achieved when we allow the grace of Christ to transform us, to help us to truly love.
As a theology teacher, I can get caught up in the content and message. I see the culture that my students are living in and realize I have the unique opportunity of presenting them with the everlasting but sometimes unpopular truth of the gospels. At times I want to drop those truth bombs, but ultimately my task is to be the love of Jesus and encourage their hearts as they grow in love with Him. It is less about what I say and more about the time, patience, and compassion that I show them as individuals.
St. Paul reminds us that it’s the everyday words and deeds infused with the grace of Christ that we are called to practice in our walk toward the eternal life. It is only through prayer and grace that “the word of the Lord may speed forward and be glorified.”
Victoria Mastrangelo is a wife, mother of three, and high school theology teacher in Houston. She loves to read, research, write, drink coffee, and travel as her dream job is to be a perpetual student. You can find her on Instagram.