THE GOOD NEWS
ARCHBISHOP BELTRAN

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August 31, 2008

The Good News...

...Somewhere To Go!

Staying at a hotel in Rome,   you quickly adjust to the European manner of numbering the various floors. What we call the first floor, they refer to as the entrance or ground floor and identify it as “O” or “zero.” Consequently, our second floor becomes their first floor and so on up the building.

On one occasion, the hotel I was staying in had a lobby and five guest floors above it. We would number that as six floors. They numbered it “O” — or “zero” and then one to five.  Knowing the European system beforehand, I was not at all srprised. Yet one day as I boarded the elevator on my fifth floor, I touched the “O”  to go down to the lobby level (our first floor) and a crazy thought struck me. In my wild imagination, I said: “You are going nowhere!” From then on, every time I enter an elevator in Europe and touch the “O”, I always say to myself:  “You are going nowhere!”

I know there are many people who believe their lives are useless or tiring or boring or so incidental that they feel they are going nowhere!  Yet, the reality is that no matter who we are, no matter what we do or don’t do, we are all indeed called by God.  We are invited by Him to go somewhere. That somewhere is heaven.  However, since we cannot see it from here, since it is shrouded in great mystery, since we don’t fully understand the very life we have, there are questions, there are doubts.  Sometimes there’s even confusion and what’s worse, despair. We press the “O” button and we panic! We go nowhere.

Factually, 2,000 years ago, all that changed. Jesus came into our world and He explained the “O – zeros.” He said He had Good News and, indeed, He did because He is the Good News!

If you find your work dull and seemingly insignificant, if you are a young person who “doesn’t fit in” or cannot find the way, if you are a  parent whose children are going astray, if you are tired or bored or sick, don’t panic. Don’t give up!  Jesus loves you.  He has a plan for you. He wants you and me and all of us to prepare now so that someday we can be with Him in heaven forever.

We don’t know the day. We know not the way. But we do know that Jesus is the Lord. We remember too that when Philip the Apostle said that he and others did not know the way, Jesus said emphatically, “I am the Way. I am the Truth. I am the Life.”

Jesus came into our world to save us from sin. He came that we might have life and have it more abundantly. Jesus is challenging us now.

When we are weary and tired and feel forlorn, let’s not press zero — that will get us nowhere. But let us turn to Jesus who is our hope and our salvation.