Loving God's Children

A Reflection on the Second Reading for Sunday, September 15th, 2024:
Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

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James
​2.14-18

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you?

If a brother or a sister is without clothing and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

I have been journeying with a group of other women online to complete “33 Days to Eucharistic Glory” (Kelly 2023). A recent daily reading stated, “Our love of comfort eliminates sacrifice from our lives, and there is no love without sacrifice, so our obsession with comfort is eliminating love” (p 85).

Then this reading from James tells me that faith without works is dead. That’s a bold and heavy realization! My faith alone may redeem me but, if I keep it solely to myself and do not act upon it, what good has it done in the world? 

I have occasionally rested on my laurels because I am active in ministry through the church. Surely those acts are rooted in faith, but rarely are they sacrificial for me. Lately I have been reflecting on just how willing I am to engage in daily works outside of the church. 

A few years ago, we found ourselves opening our home to one of our children and his family. Thinking it would be a short-term arrangement, my husband and I didn’t really think of it as sacrificial. Fast forward a couple of years and another grandchild later, and there are days when it feels sacrificial. Rising costs and moving from living as a couple close to retirement to life as a family of six have impacted our finances and our lifestyle. I have let go of having a home where anyone could drop by and find it tidy, organized and not looking like a craft store exploded in the living room. My previously clean kitchen with everything in its place now has dinosaurs and dolls on the counters, homemade slime on the kitchen table and crumbs on the floor. We have had days where my husband and I rail to each other about these inconveniences.

It is during those times that one of us, thankfully, will remind the other that these minor sacrifices of our personal comfort are actually acts of love and privilege rooted in Christ. He has given us more than what we need to help this little family lay a foundation for their future. This small act of sharing our home has resulted in two parents being freed from worry and able to channel their time into their two beautiful children and their own relationship. I see them being kinder and more loving with each other, performing and thanking each other for daily acts of kindness, like cooking a meal or doing the laundry, and  spending time reading to and playing with their children. And after five years of us taking their oldest daughter to Mass every Sunday, her father has started to join us once in a while, saying he is feeling that he needs “something.”  

Though the material help is important, the lived example of Christian love is clearly more impactful. We are witnessing Christ at work through our daily acts, and we have faith that the Lord is using this time to plant seeds. When they look back on this time in their lives, I pray they realize that it was never about us being nice people – it was always about sharing God’s love for His children.

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​Sandy Graves

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