TRANSCRIPT:
Good morning! Today is the feast of Saint Stanislaus. He was a very pious Polish bishop who oftentimes was confronting the king at the time who was a very cruel and tyrannical man. Saint Stanislaus was killed while he was offering Mass. The Tradition says that at the moment that he raised the host to consecrate it, the king struck him from behind, killed him, and then his soldiers chopped up the body and threw it out into a field. Quite the way to go.
So, this morning on our talk, we were working through this new questionnaire, digging a little bit deeper into what’s going on behind our lives, what’s contributing to the success or failure of what we’re trying to do with our lives. And I got to thinking that we are doing this to better prepare ourselves for God, not just to grow or improve in some measurable way, but actually to better prepare ourselves for that individual judgment, and none of us knows when or how that’s going to happen.
Saint Stanislaus died facing our Lord; actually in the middle of the highest act of his life. He was a very pious man, he did great works of charity and service to the poor, and so forth. He’s a saint, and so he was clearly prepared for that moment. He didn’t know how it was going to happen, when it was going to happen, but he was prepared.
These sheets that we work on- this little plan of life that we have that we check in every day or several times a day- Christopher is helping us to prepare ourselves for that individual judgment. So, if we were to go to sleep tonight and not wake up in the morning, how would our sheet look? How would the sheet of our life look when it’s time to be judged?
And so, in some way we’re getting a little insight. It’s like a little cheat sheet, if you will, for that final, end-of-life review of the sheet. How well did we do? What were our goals in life? Were we approaching God as we came to that moment in our life where our life is going to end? Or was our back to God, and maybe we were focused on something else?
So, I’m going to take kind of a different look at my sheet going forward and ask myself, “Does this sheet show today, and this last week, that I’m actually preparing myself to meet God? Have I turned away from the things of the world and turned myself towards God so that I’m ready to meet my Maker?”
That’s what I’m going to think about this week. I look forward to reviewing your videos.