FRIDAY, THIRTY SECOND WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME
2 Jn 4-9; Ps 119: 1,2,10-11,17-18; Lk 17: 26-37
THE GRACE OF LETTING GO… AND LETTING GOD
A few weeks ago, while clearing out a cupboard, Sara found an old handbag untouched for years. The receipts had gone soft alongside an expired card, a few coins, a note whose meaning she could no longer place. She sat there wondering why she’d kept it all. It was not because it was worth keeping, it is just that she had never truly desired to let it go. It struck Sara later that this is not so different from how we carry a life. We do not hold on to the past for the mere purpose of holding. An old hurt outlives the one who caused it. A need to be understood outlives the conversation that was long over. A particular image of how things should look outlives its usefulness, and still we sometimes defend it.
The Gospel offers a strange, spare line: Remember Lot’s wife. Her turning back may not even have been defiance. It perhaps was only love, or grief, reluctant to leave a life still burning behind her. That is what makes it unsettling. Her focus was on what she was leaving, and not whom she was running toward. Jeremiah 13:29 says “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” Perhaps the real question is not what to abandon, but what we are refusing to let go. Her heart was in what the Lord was asking her to ‘Let go’. She would not find God, because her attention was elsewhere.
The First Reading’s “that we love one another” points the same way. Loyalty asks for the smaller discipline of continuing to love while life alters and evolves. Some intentional choices, sometimes internally tough and hard, yet necessary. St Teresa of Ávila’s words hold both comfort and challenge: All things pass; God never changes. People change and will grow past needing us as before. Faith, perhaps, is unlearning the instinct to grip. It means that trusting that the future is not something you must catch up to, but Someone who loves you, who is already there.
Response: Blessed are they who follow the law of the Lord!
Copyright ©2026 ©Springs of Living Water https://springs.carmelmedia.in