At every Mass we hear the words, “…deliver us from all distress.” The Church understands that we tend to be anxious people, but the Lord doesn’t want us to live in distress. He wants us to rest in Him and be restored.

This afternoon, Fr. Martin used the life of St. Peter to identify four things we tend to focus on that cause us to lose our interior peace and experience distress.

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St. Therese of Lisieux wrote, “Prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy.”

So, let’s get one thing out of the way. God is never over ‘there’ because ‘there’ implies distance. And He is never distant from us. He is here.  Therefore, we begin with a reality check that prayer is not us speaking into a void and hoping God is close enough to hear. Prayer is a response to our ever present Father who is paying attention and listening even before we begin to speak.

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“Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word.”
– Luke 1:38

It’s sometimes difficult for us to trust people. Maybe we’ve been burned when we’ve trusted someone in the past. So, how do we go about growing in our trust of God? Well, one great way is to look to our Blessed Mother Mary and invite her to pray for us.

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For centuries, cultures across the globe had male initiation rituals that would delineate when the boys became men. But we don’t have those anymore. So what now? Because the world doesn’t need a bunch of grown boys in men’s bodies. The world needs men for others. We know that because of the fall of man we have weakened wills and dimmed intellects, so we must let God restore our understanding of masculinity.

“When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things.”

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Perfect. Skinny. Put together. Good with kids. Beautiful. Smart. The world has a lot of ideas about what a woman should be, and we are constantly bombarded with images of the world’s standards for us.

It’s a bunch of lies. What we need is to restore our identity of true femininity because we have an important mission as woman. The truth of who God created us to be can change how we navigate the confusing messages of the world. God created male and female with a specific purpose in mind. When we root our sense of identity in the truth of what God intends, we find freedom to be ourselves.

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