In this Sunday’s Gospel, we get to spend some time with Bartimaeus. What can we learn from this disciple’s encounter with Jesus, and how would you answer Jesus’s question: “What do you want me to do for you?”

God who is almighty does not hold power over us but is deeply with us, seeking to enter into the human experience – our every experience, thought, feeling, and relationship. How do we open ourselves to God who wants to be with us so deeply? And how do we mirror that loving presence to other people?

Our rich friend in the Gospel has all the privilege in the world. Do you think he’ll be able to lay aside that privilege and follow Jesus? I think he can. Discipleship is not something we achieve on our own but with God’s help, our God who makes all things possible.

This Sunday’s readings call us to care for each other. Like Christ who enters intimately into our lives and lives deeply and expansively, may we move toward each other in love and mutual compassion.

Times of transition call me to reflection on my life – a gentler approach that a slash and burn eradication, thank God! As I sift through all of this, I invite you to reflect too — what do we need to let go of, and what do we need more of in our lives?

Following Jesus doesn’t make people less annoying, but it does call us to put other people before ourselves. It also calls us to recognize that we are not self-sufficient; we need God and each other.

God shows us how to be open, and God is with us when we’re not. As we witness the healing, opening love of God, may we proclaim and proclaim and proclaim it.

This Pentecost, I‘m in touch with some of the wounds of the past year, but I also feel the Spirit moving, calling me forth, and releasing some of what I’ve been holding onto. The Spirit shows me what I need and what I value.

As grown-up disciples in the faith, we also must step up and step out to do the work of love and service that Jesus started. We have a whole lot of proclaiming to do. How is God calling us to serve now? How must we respond to this call?

Love is mutual. In our giving and receiving love, God’s love is apparent too.

We know that Christ remains in us because of the Spirit Christ gave us, and we know the Spirit is with us in the ways it makes itself known.

I have no control over the future. However, if I respond wholeheartedly to life’s events, both good and challenging, I’ll continue to grow into the person God created me to me, never really getting there but growing closer to God in the process. What I shall be has not yet been revealed. I do know that when it is revealed I shall be like Christ.

You and I are witnesses of Christ, the one whom we also seek. We continue the work of Christ’s first community because we are part of it. In our love for God and each other, in our care of people in need, we see how Christ is in our midst now. How can we best be present to each other in this moment?

The Triduum, the three days leading up to Easter (Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday), are some of the most beautiful liturgies we have through the church year. Here are some reflections on these holy days.

The Passion of Christ is the ultimate human story that gets played out again and again in our lives; it’s a mirror for the human story that we are living through and that others have lived through for all time. And it played out very clearly this year.

The invitation of Holy Week is to pray through the suffering of the living Christ, the Christ who loves, suffers, and rises in us individually and communally.

Let’s hold out hope for the day when the stone will be rolled away for us too, and we can safely come together unmasked in the sunshine.

God is present to the reality of who we are, even as God calls us to grow. God is certainly in our midst.

God is a God of rainbows, not destruction. If you need a sign to reassure you, go ahead and ask. Our God who loves us always wants to assure us. Even now.

The more that I, and we, live and grow into the fullness of being to which God calls us, the more we belong to God and ourselves. When we belong like that, we’ll find belonging wherever we go.