Transcript

How about we begin with a prayer, yes?

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Father in heaven, we come before you.

We ask your grace and your blessing upon us, upon this time, this class, this conversation.

Especially open our hearts to understand this whole question of evil, this whole question of suffering, and what you want to do.

So we can open our hearts to you, open our hearts to your grace, Open our hearts to your love and do your will and give you glory through Christ our Lord.

Amen.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

So tonight we're going to talk about some pretty intense stuff.

We're going to talk about suffering.

Why is there suffering?

It's important for us to know the answer to this question because this is one of the big, big questions that people ask, people of religion.

Why does this happen?

Why does God allow evil?

If He's so good, if He's so holy, why does this happen?

And in the context of that, we're going to talk about the creation of Adam and Eve.

What was our first parents like?

Talk about original sin and the fall of Adam and Eve.

The ultimate answer to evil and suffering in the world.

What's the ultimate answer?

Why does God allow this?

What's His answer?

Okay, so to review a little bit from the last couple of weeks, Well, we talked about this first week, we kind of gave an overview of the RCIA process.

The goal is to really figure out, is this the truth?

That's what Catholicism claims.

Catholicism claims to be 100% true.

Even while all Catholics around the world are sinners, that the teachings of the church are true.

And so we talked about that there is objective truth about religion.

That's a key component, right?

This isn't just a matter of opinion.

God either exists or he doesn't. And whether he exists or doesn't, that doesn't depend on my belief.

If everybody in the world believed in him, it wouldn't make him exist.

If everybody in the world didn't believe in him, it wouldn't make him not exist.

And so we're called to conform our lives to the truth.

That was one of the main points of the first week.

We are called to not just look for a religion that agrees with my beliefs, because my beliefs can be really selfish, my beliefs can be a combination of every movie I've ever seen.

We're called to actually find the truth.

Because we know that truth leads to goodness and fulfillment.

It's the truth that sets us free.

You could have the religion that makes you feel the most comfortable, makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, but if it's not the truth, what good is it?

It's just a lie.

It's like the person who has all sorts of fuzzy feelings from drugs.

That's not a real.

That's not reality.

When they say, oh, I feel so great.

Yeah, it's because you're drunk.

These are not real.

making your body not work correctly.

So no, we want to find the truth, conform our lives to the truth, because that's the path of goodness, that's the path of fulfillment.

We talked about those five questions, right?

Is there a truth?

Yes.

Does God exist?

And that's what we talked about in the second class, the existence of God and prayer.

That we can actually prove that there is an all-powerful God.

We can prove that.

Not just, I mean, of course by looking at miracles, right?

Miracles happen that defy the laws of physics, and we'll talk about some of those miracles throughout this class.

But because, by reason, we can just look it around and say, nothing in this world created itself, right?

There has to be a first cause.

We see cause-effect, cause-effect.

There has to be a first cause, who is God, someone who is not created, who is the Creator.

We talked about several of the rational arguments of that.

We know that God is eternal.

He's outside of time.

He created time.

He's all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good.

And we even talked about the meaning of life.

That He created us to share in His own blessed life.

And that we need prayer.

We need a supernatural relationship with God.

The goal is not to just intellectually believe that God exists, like I think Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president.

The goal is to actually have a real, life-giving, actual relationship with God, to interact with God.

And then one of these lines that kind of sums up the whole purpose of life, of why we exist.

The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God, and God never ceases to draw man to himself.

Only in God will he find the truth and happiness that He never stops searching for.

This is the claim that God has made you not to be a billionaire, not to just have infinite video games and infinite pleasure and fun.

He created you for union with Himself, for union with an infinite being.

Nothing on this earth can satisfy the heart except real love, real union, real supernatural connection with an infinite, all-powerful being.

That's the claim.

If the claim is just, nope, all I need is food in my belly and a screen to stare at, then that doesn't make any sense.

It doesn't make any sense to be here.

But if there's something in us that says, no, there's something in me that wants more, something in me that wants more than this world can provide, yeah, there's a desire for God.

Some people use this saying, maybe heard it before, there's a God-shaped hole in our heart.

You can put whatever you want in there, that if you put God, it's not going to be complete.

You're not going to be fulfilled.

It's not going to have what you want.

So, what is the meaning of life?

We talked about this.

The meaning of life is to share in the blessed life of God, both on earth and eternally in heaven.

Or the old Baltimore Catechism way of saying it, to know, love, and serve God in this life, and be with Him forever in heaven.

That's the goal.

So, what about evil?

This is the big claim of the atheist.

Number one argument against believing in God, against religion, the claim of the atheist is, if there is this good, all-powerful God, then why is there so much suffering in the world?

There's evil in the world that's obvious.

We can see that.

We can see that with regards to the hurricanes and homes being destroyed and lives being lost all these natural disasters, you can see this great poverty in the world, all around the world, people starving to death, see illness, kids in the hospital, kids dying, all sorts of problems, and say, well, if God's good and He's all-powerful, why is He allowing this?

Is He not all-powerful?

Well, then we shouldn't worship Him.

If He's not all-good, well, then we shouldn't worship Him either.

So what's the answer?

What's the answer?

Well, I'm going to go give you the bad solutions, right?

There's only so many options.

We know that suffering exists.

And we can prove God's existence.

So the question is going to be, what is God going to do?

What are some things that, at least intellectually, we can say, alright, what are the options here?

One option, God could just take away our free will, right?

A lot of suffering is because of our free will.

People kill each other.

People harm each other.

People steal and rob and put each other in poverty.

There's all sorts of stuff that we do.

So God could just take away our free will and say, I'm not going to let you do any of it.

You will obey me 100% of the time.

Well, then we're not free.

We're not able to love.

You can't love if you're not free.

If God just changed us from humans into robots, and we will just follow our programming and do as we are told, that's not going to work.

No one can love in that situation, right?

This computer, it doesn't love me.

It doesn't care about me at all.

It just does what I say.

Well, you know, unless there's a bug, then it does what the bug says.

No, that's not a good solution.

God's just taking away our free will.

Free will is required for love.

If God created us for love, if He created us to share in His life and His love, I have to have free will.

God could just, okay, what's another option?

God could just stop our free will.

He could prevent us from doing evil.

He's like, oh, you want to do this thing?

Just as the person's going to pull the trigger or take the knife?

No. I will not let you.

I will not let you.

But what is that?

Again, that's an enslavement.

He's saying, I'm going to give you free will, but the second you try to do something I don't want you to, I will literally force you and stop you to do this.

Well, then God's enslaving us.

He's abusing us.

Again, that's not good.

It wouldn't be good for every...

And at what level?

At the level of thoughts?

Like, I will force you not to think something bad.

about to gossip and God just takes your voice away.

Yeah, that might prevent a lot of evil, but would that foster love?

That would foster fear.

I don't know what type of relationship that would be with God.

There's a level of control that would definitely not foster much love for God.

Okay, option number three.

God could just strike us dead.

When you were about to do evil, you're going to go kill that person?

Boom!

Lightning bolt.

You're dead.

Take your life.

Another option that would stop a lot of evil.

But then what would happen?

When you die, you get judged.

You die, everyone who gets killed by God, quote-unquote killed by God, struck down by God, they're going to end up going to hell.

Because their heart is set on evil, they're going to do evil, they're about to do it and God just kills them.

No time to repent, no time to change.

Boom, now where are we?

Everybody's just going to hell.

Again, that's a world where people would definitely believe in God, but they would be terrified of God.

If you knew that if you were about to do something bad enough, at whatever level, maybe it's just, even just any sin, that God would just kill you, that would be terrifying.

That would be a terrifying world.

You have a bad thought, bam, dead.

It's going to be a terrifying world.

Would you want a deep, close, amazing relationship with God?

No, you'd be like, I want to stay as far away from this God as possible.

I'm scared of Him.

He's going to kill me.

It'd be hard to have a close relationship with Him.

So that's not a good option.

Or I think what some people kind of want is they want this world where God just constantly cleans up every mess we make undoes the damage of every sin that we commit.

Right?

So, I cause the suffering, I do the damage, I do the evil, and God just goes and takes it away.

You know, someone gets into a fight and beats up somebody else, God just takes all that pain away.

I punch myself in the face, God just doesn't make it hurt.

Again, what type of world is that?

Oh, but Father, it's a world without suffering.

Yeah, but it's also a world of complete and utter selfishness.

How good of a person would you think the average person would become if anything they do doesn't have any negative consequence, they could be as sinful and as selfish as they want, and God is just always cleaning up their messes, always taking away their pain and their suffering?

I would think we would become corrupt, horrible human beings.

We would be selfish sinners without love.

In psychology, we call that codependency.

when the person is alcoholic and they're just destroying their lives, and the wife or the husband is just constantly cleaning up the mess, constantly cleaning up the mess, enabling the sin.

And at some point, that spouse has got to detach.

It's got to say, listen, you don't want to change.

I'm done cleaning up your mess.

You want to change?

I'll be there to help you.

You just want to destroy yourself and have me clean up the mess?

That's not healthy.

That's not a healthy relationship.

God wants to love us and wants to help us, but He's not pathetic.

He's not just our garbage collector, just our butler to just do as we say and clean up our messes and we can just trash the house and He just always picks up after us.

That's not a healthy relationship with God either.

So we look at the different options.

None of these are good options to the solution of suffering.

What's the short answer?

The short answer is this.

God created a world without suffering and death.

That's important to remember.

God did not create a world where we would have to suffer and die.

Evil and suffering exist because we have free will and can turn away from God.

Evil and suffering exist in this world because we sin.

God respects us enough to let our actions have actual consequences.

I have dignity, I have value, my free will can affect things.

If I punch myself in the face, he's going to let it hurt.

I can actually cause things to happen.

And my ability to cause things to happen can have good effects, right?

I can affect millions of people in a positive way, or I can affect millions of people in a negative way.

There's a good side of that, right?

Affecting people in a positive way.

Of course, the negative side.

God does not let evil get the last word, and conquers sin and death in Jesus Christ.

We'll talk more about that, but this is the short answer, the short version.

So, now we're going to go into the longer version.

The Garden.

So, God created the world.

Again, we said, how many days?

We don't know.

Catholics are free to believe that it took six days.

We're free to believe that it took billions of years.

But we do know that God created the world.

He created a world with a purpose.

There was a design, and at some point, God created Adam and Eve.

God created our first parents.

Because no amount of evolution can produce a spiritual soul.

Okay, so in the beginning, God created stick figures.

No. No? Okay.

This is, you know, that's why I'm a priest, not an artist.

Alright, in the beginning, God created Adam, and it says, God created Adam and created him in his image and likeness.

in the image and likeness of God.

And we can refer to that maybe as his natural life.

So what does this mean?

What does it mean to be in the image and likeness of God?

One, it means I have an intellect capable of knowing truth.

This computer mouse doesn't have an intellect.

This podium doesn't have an intellect.

It doesn't know any truth.

It doesn't even know...

It's so dumb, this podium is so dumb, it doesn't even know 1 plus 1 equals 2. It doesn't know anything.

It doesn't have a brain.

It doesn't have an intellect.

And we have free will.

Free will that gives us the capacity to choose what's good.

That's why God gave us free will.

He gave us free will not to choose evil, but to choose good freely.

And that gives us the capacity for love, to make a gift of ourselves, self-gift.

You can't love what you don't know, right?

If I say, how many of you love the Bibelbaum?

You all look at me like, what are you talking about?

Exactly, you don't know what that is.

It's nothing.

I just made it up.

So you can't love what you don't know.

So you have to have an intellect that can know in order to love.

And we have to be free.

Does this podium love me?

Not a single bit.

Doesn't care about me at all.

That computer doesn't love me at all.

Doesn't care about me at all.

Doesn't have free will.

So that's what it means to be in the image and likeness of God.

But then it also says, that God created Adam in friendship with Himself, in friendship with God.

This is what we'll call divine life.

God made Adam holy.

He filled his soul with grace.

What we call the grace of original justice and holiness.

And this is key.

This is so important.

Also known as sanctifying grace.

So God created Adam with capacity to know and love, and then God filled his soul with grace.

this grace of original justice and holiness.

Because the Scriptures say that God walked in the garden with them.

There was a harmony.

A harmony with God.

He was in communion with God.

There was harmony with Himself.

This inner freedom and self-mastery.

Because of this grace, Adam and Eve were inclined to sin.

They could still sin.

They could still be tempted.

But they were inclined to do what's right and good.

And they had harmony with each other.

The Scripture talks about them being in the garden naked without shame.

Because grace was so operative, they could even look at each other in their nakedness and not be tempted to see each other as a piece of pizza, to not see each other as an object of lust, but to see each other as a reflection of God.

Wow, this is beautiful.

Someone who's beautiful.

And they had harmony with creation.

And they were placed in the garden, in this protected place, and given a mission.

So the gifts that they had in the garden, they had sanctifying grace, the supernatural gift, which is a sharing in the nature of God Himself, and which raises men to the supernatural order, conferring on them powers entirely above those proper to human nature.

They have the supernatural virtues and the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

You're going to learn about the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Wisdom, understanding, knowledge, counsel, piety, fortitude, and fear of the Lord.

That every aspect of their humanity was saturated with grace.

They even had what is called these preternatural gifts.

In the Garden of Paradise, they had this happiness, this great knowledge, easy knowledge.

They could learn really easily.

They had control of the passions by reason.

Their emotions were ordered by reason.

They weren't flipping out over every little thing.

Oh, they didn't like my picture on Instagram.

Nope.

Of course, there was an Instagram back then, but if there was, they would have been under control.

And there was freedom from suffering and death.

They did not even have to suffer.

This is important.

People say, why is there suffering in the world?

God didn't create a world with suffering.

We did.

We messed it up.

These gifts would have been passed down to their children and grandchildren all the way down to us had they not sinned.

But that's not what happened.

So, God creates Adam.

In grace, divine life, not good for man to be alone because he has no one to love.

No one of the same nature to love, right?

Adam can't pour his heart out in love to an elephant or to a tiger.

No, they're not the same nature.

And so God takes a rib from Adam and forms Eve.

And again, whether God actually put Adam to sleep and took a rib out of him, or if that's just a metaphor, it's not the point.

As Catholics, we can believe either.

But it's important for the Scriptures to say that because men and women have equal dignity.

It didn't take a foot from Adam.

Women aren't below men.

Women are equal to men and are joined at the heart.

So it gives them a commandment to be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.

God creates the world and He creates us to be co-creators with Him.

He establishes the covenant of marriage.

Marriage is one of the things not destroyed and damaged by the fall of Adam and Eve and the flood.

It can be affected by sin, of course.

People can ruin relationships through sin, God established the marriage covenant from the very beginning, a union between one man and one woman for the sake of their own good and the good of children.

They're called to share in God's act of creation, to create new human beings.

So the family becomes an image of the Trinity.

God is a communion of persons.

And when He creates, He says, let us create man in our image.

And He creates them male and female to be this communion, to be this family.

Now, of course, God is not human.

God is divine, so He doesn't have a gender.

He's not male or female.

He's God.

He's infinite spirit.

He's revealed Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And, of course, Jesus, the Son of God, became a man.

It's a kind of human nature.

But the family is an image of the Trinity, this communion of persons.

We've given this world to be able to cultivate, to be able to use the things of the world to live and function, to order and offer creation as a gift to God.

We are the bridge between the spiritual and material world.

We've got God, infinite all-powerful being.

You've got angels, these pure spirits.

You've got rocks and plants and animals, and you've got us right at the center.

combining both, the connection of both.

They're called to respond to God's love.

They're given free will.

And with free will, it means you've got to make a choice.

Are you going to follow God?

Are you going to live in a relationship with God?

Or are you just going to live for yourself?

This is the choice.

The choice we have every day is, Are you going to live for just yourself, or are you going to live for God?

What is the purpose of your existence?

Why are you alive?

What are you going to live for today?

What do you believe the meaning of your life today is?

Well, it's just to go to school, it's just to come home, it's just to have fun, just to have friends.

It's just these things.

That's the meaning of my life today.

My meaning of my life is just this screen, you know, whatever's on this screen.

Is that the meaning of life?

Or, is the meaning of life to have a relationship with an infinite, all-powerful being?

to have an actual, not just to think that He exists, meant to be more than that, not to just think that there is a God.

Anybody can do that, but actually have a real relationship.

So, God creates Adam, creates him with divine life, natural life, divine life, sanctifying grace.

And He meets a girl, God creates Eve, and creates her with divine life, sanctifying grace.

But then, a guy falls in love with a girl, bone to my bone, flesh to my flesh, a biblical way of saying, oh, they're amazing.

But then, along comes the serpent.

Along comes the serpent to tempt Eve.

Now, sometimes we think of a serpent as this little itty bitty snake, like a little gardener's stake, but that's not what the Scriptures talk about.

It's actually like this big serpent type of what we might think of as a dragon or something, you know, a big serpent.

And so, the girl becomes in danger of death.

The devil starts tempting her.

Did God really say you couldn't eat of any of the fruit?

Well, no, He didn't say we couldn't eat any.

We just can't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

What's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?

The tree of knowledge of good and evil is this tree of, are you going to decide for yourself what's right and wrong?

Just going to do as you please?

Or are you going to trust God and follow God?

No, I say it's okay for me to do this, even though God says no.

That's the tree of knowledge of good and evil right there in a nutshell.

Well, that's what God says, but I'm going to do my own thing.

I'm going to follow my own rules.

I'm going to play God.

And then the serpent's like, you're not going to die.

You'll be like God.

You'll decide what's right and wrong.

You'll decide what's good and evil.

And so Eve gets tempted.

And Adam, who's in the garden with her, does nothing.

Adam's the original couch potato.

One of the temptations of God is laziness, to not defend the bride.

Oh, yeah, I defend people all the time.

Playing Call of Duty.

No, you actually have a call to real duty.

Go do something.

And it's not this.

You know, that's fake.

Those games are addicting because it gives a fake, a fake satisfaction of accomplishing something meaningful when it's not.

Any game, any video game can be solved with one button.

Know what button that is?

It's a cheat code for every video game, to solve every video game.

You don't know what the one button cheat code is to solve every video game?

It's called the off button.

Off button.

So it is.

So, a girl dies.

Now, she doesn't keel over dead, otherwise we wouldn't exist.

So what dies in her?

Divine life dies.

Sanctifying grace dies.

This is really important for understanding salvation.

The life that they had with God dies.

They still have their natural life.

We are still here.

We still have intellects.

We still have free will.

But they don't have sanctifying grace.

They lost that communion with God.

This is essential.

And they do not live happily ever after.

So, they still have their natural life.

They still have bodies.

They still have souls.

They still have intellects and free will.

But they lost divine life.

They lost the grace of original justice and holiness.

So important.

So, the result of the fall.

We are left to ungraced human nature.

And ungraced human nature is weak.

Grace was filling us so much, making us supernatural beings, living on a supernatural level.

Without that grace, yes, we still have bodies and souls.

But now, we're inclined to sin.

This is called concupiscence.

Now we're inclined to selfishness and disobedience, and I'm going to do whatever I please.

Whereas before, they weren't. They could still choose it, and they did, but they weren't inclined to it.

Now we're subject to ignorance, a darkened intellect.

It's difficult to learn stuff now.

We have a weakened will.

It's difficult to resist temptations.

Grace was strengthening their will.

It was still free.

They could still be faithful.

But now without that, we're weak.

Like, oh, I don't feel like doing this.

I don't feel like, you know.

We're weak.

And we have disordered passions and desires.

This is really important for understanding a lot of stuff that's going on in the world today.

That our desires can be messed up.

Your passions, what you want, your attractions, can be messed up.

They can be disordered, right?

I have a disordered desire for pizza.

I've mentioned this many times.

I like pizza a lot.

There'll be times where I'll feel like eating pizza three times a day, every day.

That's a disordered desire.

If I do that, which I obviously have done too much of, I will die of a heart attack.

When you're a little kid, how often do you want to eat candy?

Every day.

All day, right?

At Halloween, you just want to be like, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom.

And the parents have got to be like, no, you can eat this much.

I want to eat more.

You're going to make yourself sick, kid.

If a parent asks a five-year-old, what do you want for breakfast?

Ice cream or cereal?

What are they going to say?

Ice cream.

They do that every day, every meal.

They're going to say, I have malnutrition.

We have desires in us that are disordered.

This is what the world doesn't understand.

The world says, if you just get what you want, when you want, you can just have everything your way, do what you feel like doing, when you feel like doing it, you'll be happy.

And the media uses that to sell billions of dollars worth of stuff.

All they've got to do is stir up your desires and say, see, this is what you want for $9.95. No, that's not the truth.

In order to find happiness, we have to get what is right and true and good.

What we feel like doing isn't going to work, right?

Somebody can feel like sitting and watching TV on a couch all day, but then they're going to be homeless and they're going to starve to death.

You can't actually do that.

That's not healthy.

So, that's important.

We'll talk more about that when we talk about morality.

Just because you desire something, just because you're attracted to something, doesn't mean you're supposed to have it.

Doesn't mean having it's going to bring you true human fulfillment.

There's this harmony with God and self and others in creation.

They've broken that relationship with God.

And then, of course, that means spiritual death.

Their communion with God is spiritual death.

And because that grace was giving them immortality on earth, Without that grace, our bodies are weak, our bodies fall apart, our bodies die.

Grace was holding it together supernaturally.

Without that grace, death.

And then they are exiled from the garden and exiled from heaven.

So, this is a really important definition to learn today.

What is original sin?

What is original sin?

Because a lot of people think of original sin as that you're born with this smudge, you're born with this stain, you're born with mud on your soul.

Well, God makes the soul.

And so if He made the soul, He would have to make the mud.

No, that's not it.

Original sin is being born without something.

It's not being born with something, it's being born without something.

Adam and Eve were created with grace.

We are created without grace.

Adam and Eve were created with sanctifying grace.

We are born without it because of the fall of Adam and Eve.

Because they broke that covenant, we don't get to benefit from the covenant.

Just like if your parents were billionaires and they just spent all the billions, would you be able to inherit the billions?

No, they spent it.

If they just decided to have a big bonfire and burn all their money, they have free will.

They can do that.

That would be dumb.

But so is sin.

Sin is dumb.

But then you wouldn't be able to inherit it.

You can't give what you don't have.

They broke that covenant, and therefore, now we live outside of it.

So original sin is not a destruction of goodness, which is what some Christian groups believe.

Some Christian groups, Protestant groups, they believe that once Adam and Eve fell, mankind is no longer good, mankind is completely corrupt.

No. we are still sacred, we're still like a chalice, but we're empty.

It's a loss of sanctifying grace.

And so we need sanctifying grace back.

It's going to be the other big question.

What do I have to have in order to get to heaven?

What do I have to have to get to heaven?

Sanctifying grace.

I have to have a supernatural communion with God.

And then there's this promise in Genesis 3.15. And God sees what they did.

Right?

You sinned.

You disobeyed.

I told you not to.

I told you.

Trust me.

Follow me.

It gave you all this world, and you're just like, we're going to do our own thing.

We're not going to trust an infinite, all-perfect, all-good, loving God who created this world and created us and created us in His image and gave us all these things.

We're just going to do as we please.

So dumb!

But God doesn't abandon them.

He doesn't say, well, I'm done.

I give up.

No. He prophesies.

The first prophecy in the Scriptures He says to the serpent, I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed.

He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.

Or rather, the translation says, you will strike at his heel and he will crush your head.

So, who fulfills this prophecy?

Who is the woman whose seed crushes the serpent?

Who is the woman whose son crushes the power of Satan?

What?

The Virgin Mary, right?

Because it's Jesus, the one who crushes the head of the serpent.

Maybe you saw, there's a movie version of this.

Did you guys ever see The Passion of the Christ?

You see it in the Garden of Eden?

There's the Garden of, the Agony of the Garden, the Garden of Gethsemane.

The serpent's there and then Jesus gets up and he goes, crushes his head.

That's pointing to that prophecy.

Okay.

So, why are there evils in the world?

Ultimately, the big answer is, it's all from the fall of Adam and Eve.

It's all from the fall of Adam and Eve.

Now, there's two main types of evils.

The evils of nature and the evils of sin.

We can do bad stuff.

We can kill people.

That's an evil.

But there's also tornadoes and hurricanes and earthquakes.

So evils of nature are only a problem because we're in the way.

Right?

No one shakes their fist at God when there's a hurricane or a tornado in Antarctica.

Unless you're living in Antarctica.

No one cares about an earthquake in the North Pole where there's nobody.

But we were never meant to be in the way.

We were meant to be in the garden.

We were meant to be in this secure place.

But now we're not.

Now in physics it's called entropy.

It's the material reality falls apart.

So we're in the way of the evils of nature because we're not in the garden anymore.

Most of the evils of the world are from the evils of sin.

And that's our free will.

We're freely choosing.

But we can say that the preciousness of love is worth the risk of free will.

God created us to share in His life.

To do that, we have to be free, which means He's got to give us the ability, at least, to choose to love or not love.

And unfortunately, Adam and Eve, and all of us, Adam and Eve chose to not love, and so many times we choose to not love God.

Okay, so that's the intellectual side of this.

So why is there evil in the world?

Because we have free will.

We can do stupid things.

God created a world without suffering.

We messed it up.

We lost that grace.

Okay, but that's still not a deeply satisfying answer.

You know, we think, okay, that's an intellectual answer that makes sense, but it doesn't console me very much when I'm suffering.

Okay, so let's look at some Scripture.

In John 11, it says this, now when Jesus came, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days.

So Lazarus was his friend with Martha and Mary, and Lazarus died.

Martha and Mary sent word to Jesus, hey, Jesus, your friend here is sick, he's dying.

Thinking, okay, he's going to come back, he's going to heal him, and Jesus doesn't, he waits.

And Lazarus dies.

Bethany was near Jerusalem, about two miles off, And many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them concerning their brother.

When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him while Mary sat in the house.

Martha said to Jesus, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.

That's a pretty understandable thing that people will say.

Where is God?

Where was he?

Where were you?

You know, if you had just been here, God, if you just would have showed up, this person would have suffered.

They wouldn't have died.

But she also adds this act of faith.

Even now, I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.

Jesus said to her, your brother will rise again.

Martha said to him, I know that he will rise again in the resurrection in the last day.

Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and the life.

He who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.

And whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.

Do you believe this?

She said to him, yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, He who is coming into the world.

So these questions, where were you, Lord?

Where were you?

It's a reminder to us that when we're suffering, we don't just need a solution to the suffering, right?

When a kid is in pain, they don't cry out, Band-Aid!

What do they cry out?

Mom!

They cry out for the person.

When we're suffering, we need Jesus Himself.

When we're suffering, we shouldn't just cry out, Lord, make this go away!

We should be like, Lord, come here!

What did You do about this?

We need to encounter the cross.

What do you want to do now?

God wants to bring us His grace.

And what is Your will for my life?

These are the right questions to ask.

Where were you, Lord?

Understandable question, but He's always with us.

If He wasn't with us, we would literally cease to exist.

And so He cannot abandon us.

It's not possible.

We would cease to exist if He did.

And I remember this time when I was talking to a teenager who was trying to decide whether they were going to get confirmed or not.

They didn't know that they wanted to be Catholic, they wanted to believe all this stuff.

Because that's the only reason you should get confirmed when you're ready to go all in.

You're like, yes, I believe this.

I'm going to be Catholic.

I'm going to do this.

I'm going to live this out.

That's when you know you're ready to actually be confirmed.

Otherwise, if it's just, well, I'm just trying to make my parents happy, so they'll leave me alone.

I'm just going to do this to get them off my back.

Well, that's not a good reason.

You shouldn't get confirmed for that reason.

And so she was being honest.

She was like, I don't know if I believe this stuff.

I was like, all right.

So I played the car salesman card.

I said, well, what's it going to take?

What would it take for you to be a super devout Catholic?

What would it take for you to be a legit Catholic, like believe this stuff, be real, for real?

And she said, I want to see a miracle.

I was like, that's easy.

I can show you miracles.

That's easy.

So I showed her some pictures of defy the laws of physics miracles, and I'll show you a picture of one at the end of the class.

Well, I think her first question was, prove that God exists.

I was like, alright, that's easy.

We talked about that last week.

So I went through proof for God's existence, and I was like, does that make sense to you?

She's like, yeah.

Any arguments against, like trying to disprove me?

No, it makes sense.

Okay.

Well, prove that Jesus was real.

So I went through that, and we'll talk about that next week.

How do we know that this guy, Jesus of Nazareth, really walked the face of the earth?

There's a lot of evidence.

So I went through that, and I was like, does that make sense?

Yeah.

Any arguments?

No. You know, then came the miracle card, and I was like, alright, there's lots of miracles.

And if you're wanting me to go like, fire!

Like, that's not how that works.

I mean, God's not a circus monkey to just jump at our command, right?

He works miracles, and there's many of them.

I don't know how many.

I've been witness to several.

But it's not like, just like that.

That would be weird.

It would be, you know, that's magic world.

That's not miracle world.

And so we went through all these things.

How do we know that Jesus started a Catholic church?

All these different arguments.

Great.

Spent like 40 minutes going through arguments.

And at the end of it, I said, so, you know, any arguments back?

Does this all make sense?

Yeah.

I said to her, do you believe now?

And you could tell she kind of had that, like, refrigerator look, you know, when you stand in front of the refrigerator.

Like, what are you looking for?

I don't know.

She was looking for something.

She didn't know what it was.

She thought maybe the arguments would help.

And I was like, didn't work, did it?

She's like, no.

I said, I didn't think it would, to be honest.

These arguments work.

These arguments are true.

We can prove these things.

But I don't think it was an intellectual argument that destroyed your faith.

So what destroyed your faith?

It wasn't someone said to you, I'm going to prove Catholicism wrong.

You can't do that.

It's not possible.

What destroyed your faith?

And she said, my best friend had cancer and died.

And I prayed every day for God to heal her.

And He didn't, and she died.

And if God's so good, why would He allow that?

I asked Him every day to heal her.

This is the question, right?

Where were you?

What are you doing about this suffering?

So that's when I took the cross down from my wall, and I put it in front of her, and I said, you ask Him what He did for her.

Where were you when my friend had cancer and was dying?

Because his answer is on the cross.

That's where he was.

I said, when you saw your friend suffering, you visited her, you prayed for her.

When he saw that she would suffer, he took on that suffering on the cross, battled sin and death, went to hell and back, not just so that she could live for another few decades, so that she could live forever.

You prayed for her to be healed.

And if she's in heaven, she was healed.

Maybe not the healing that you wanted.

You wanted a healing that kept her here.

But God knows what we're made for.

He knows that we're made for heaven.

He knows that we're made for eternal life with Him.

And so what does He do?

He deals with the suffering.

Not by ignoring it.

Not by just staying up in heaven and being like, well, that's tough, human race.

You messed up.

You sinned against me.

Tough to be you, you know.

Sorry, not my problem.

No, He makes it His problem.

It's our problem, but He makes it His.

He comes down to earth.

For our sake, He made Him to be sin, who knew no sin, so in Him we might become the righteousness of God.

The perfect, all-holy One, the infinite One, took on our humanity.

This is the answer This is the Catholic answer for suffering.

Why does God allow suffering?

We have free will.

He messed it up.

What is He doing about it?

He takes on the suffering.

He takes on our nature.

We rejected His life.

We rejected communion with Him.

We rejected sharing in the life of God.

So what does He do?

He comes and shares our life.

Comes and shares our nature.

Comes and shares our humanity.

He said, communion with God?

Forget it.

We don't want to sin.

We want to live by ourselves.

He said, I don't want that.

I don't want you to burn in hell.

I don't want you to live without me.

That's not how I made you.

You're not going to find happiness and fulfillment.

Blah, blah, blah.

We're going to sin.

And so what does he do?

He takes on our humanity.

He joins himself with our nature.

He shares in our life.

And we murdered him.

We killed him.

He takes on all that suffering, all the sin, all the death, He dies for us and rises from the dead.

He has literally gone to hell and back for us.

He enters into that suffering.

One of my favorite passages in the Scripture in the Old Testament is Lamentations 3. The book of Lamentations is just a raw book.

If you're just feeling moody and you want to just be moody, man, the book of Lamentations is your book.

It's just a moody person's dream book.

Because it's written right after the destruction of the temple.

The prophet Jeremiah had been preaching like, repent, repent, repent.

The enemies are going to come in and destroy us.

We need God to miraculously protect us.

Repent, repent.

You're worshiping false gods.

You think you can just do whatever you want and God's going to clean up your messes and it's not going to happen.

You can't just treat God like garbage and have him be your garbage collector.

That's not how this works.

And they don't. And the Babylonians come in and obliterate Jerusalem.

They take the people off into captivity, they destroy the temple, they kill massive amounts of people.

Jeremiah's life work was to save people from this destruction, and they wouldn't turn away from sin, they wouldn't turn back to God.

And so, this is what he says, he says, My soul is bereft of peace.

I have forgotten what happiness is.

So I say, gone is my glory and my expectation from the Lord.

Remember the affliction and my bitterness, the wormwood and the gall.

My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me.

He is just devastated.

But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.

His mercies never come to an end.

They are new every morning.

Great is Thy faithfulness.

The Lord is my portion, says my soul, therefore I will hope in Him.

The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the soul that seeks Him.

It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.

In the midst of all that, he says, yep, we deserved it.

We messed it up.

But I know God's not done.

I know that He's going to do something.

I know He hasn't abandoned me.

Yep, we're suffering because of our own choices and our own sins.

We messed it up.

We deserve it.

But I'm going to turn to the Lord.

I'm going to say, what do you want to do, Lord?

I know that you've got something in mind.

It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth, Let him sit alone in silence when he has laid it on him.

Let him put his mouth in the dust.

There may yet be hope.

Let him get his cheek to the smiter and be filled with insults, for the Lord will not cast off forever.

But though he causes grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love.

For he does not willingly afflict or grieve the sons of men.

You kind of think of this in high school, oh, all this drama, it's so difficult.

It's important to remember, it doesn't last forever.

It is only four years.

You will get through it.

It will get better.

It will end.

And suffering is like, yeah, there is suffering.

But there is a God who doesn't just magically take away all the suffering, because we bring it on ourselves, but He doesn't abandon us.

He wants to do something in the suffering.

And so, in John 11, remember Jesus with Lazarus?

His friend dies.

Martha's like, you know, if you'd been here, my brother would not have died, but even now...

He says, where did you lay Him?

And it's the shortest passage in Scripture.

It says, Jesus wept.

Jesus wept.

He knew He was going to raise Him from the dead, but He still entered into the tragedy of suffering.

He still wept.

He still entered into the sorrow and the pain.

He's like, this is not how I made this to be.

I did not make it to be this way.

I created a world where He wouldn't have to deal with all this.

But He didn't abandon us even when we abandoned Him.

He comes in and He enters into the depths of the suffering.

So, again, why does God allow suffering?

God created a world without suffering.

Humanity turned away from God and lost that covenant.

We can choose our actions, but not the consequences.

It's an important lesson for young people.

Just because you can choose your actions, but you cannot control your consequences.

You choose to drink and get into a car, you cannot control whether you kill yourself, 15 people, 100 people, Nobody.

You don't control your consequences.

You can choose your sins, but you don't get to control the consequences.

Our sins can have huge consequences.

But God did not abandon us, but reached out to mankind through the series of covenants in the Old Testament.

God's voice was like, hey, over here, follow me.

I know the way.

I'm smarter than you guys.

Do as I say and you'll live.

This will be better for you.

Follow these commandments.

Don't kill each other.

Don't lie to each other.

Don't steal from each other.

Stop committing adultery.

I know the way.

We're like, sin, sin, sin.

We just do stupid things.

And so, again and again, it offers mankind a relationship with Himself.

Of course, then God actually comes to earth in Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

In Jesus Christ, God takes on our human nature and shares our suffering.

He suffers.

And we can unite our sufferings to God and receive real love from God in the midst of our pain.

So Jesus suffers our suffering.

He dies our death.

He offered all of our sin, suffering, and death to God the Father in a pure act of love.

So suffering has been conquered by the love of God.

And we can experience God's love in our suffering.

I've witnessed this many times.

Like one of my friends, Danielle, she had cancer five times before she died.

And she got it when she was a teenager.

And for some of the people, she was a downhill skier, Even when she was amputated and she was a one-legged downhill skier, John Elway called her the greatest athlete in Colorado.

And you look at things like she's dying in the prime of her life, like this is so horrible, so miserable.

She was one of the happiest people I've ever met in my entire life.

Why?

because she knew the love of God in a real, radical, sustain you, radiate through you type of way.

You could not be around this girl without realizing really quickly, this girl loves God a lot.

And that's what's making her happy.

It ain't the cancer that's making her happy.

It is that she has a real relationship with God.

And I remember when I went to see her right before she died, it was probably, well, Not the first person, not the first death that I had been by, been at, but it was the first time where I'd ever, like, I was, she was wasting away, you know, dying, and I remember just, like, this overwhelming sense of envy, this overwhelming sense of jealousy coming over me, like, you won the race.

Like, you're gonna get to go be with Jesus.

It's like, yeah, this suffering is tragic, and there's a lot of people praying for her healing, but she knew who she was in love with.

She knew what she wanted out of life.

She wanted to be with God.

And God was answering that prayer, man.

And after she died, man, I felt this crazy amount of grace come into my life.

It was like, Daniel was like, come on, you need to get holy.

I'm praying for you.

It was a huge, huge influx of grace.

And so, we can unite our sufferings to Christ as a gift of love and prayer.

We can experience, even in suffering, we can say, Okay, Lord, I'm not asking You to just take away this pain.

I want You.

Fill me with Your love.

I give You this pain.

If You want to take it away, great.

But what I need right now is Your love and Your life and Your grace and Your mercy.

I need You.

I don't need You to be my Excedrin or my Aspirin.

I need You to be the love of my soul.

I need You to fill me with Your love.

And that's why saints who are even being tortured could sing and praise to God not because they liked the suffering, but because God was so pouring out such massive love, they were experiencing fulfillment and joy.

And so we can unite our sufferings to Christ.

It's called redemptive suffering.

Alright, Lord, You offered Your sufferings as a gift for my salvation.

I'm going to offer my sufferings as a gift.

And this is what St. Paul says, Now I rejoice in my sufferings for Your sake.

In my flesh, I complete what is lacking in Christ's affliction for the sake of His body, that is, the church.

We're called to participate.

We're called to offer our sufferings to Christ.

So, what does this mean?

It means we can seek Jesus in the midst of our suffering because He's already there.

You're experiencing loneliness?

You can say, Jesus, fill me with your love.

You can say, maybe this loneliness is Jesus saying, hey, Instagram ain't going to fulfill you.

Snapchat ain't going to fulfill you.

All these friendships, not even them are enough.

You need me.

You need my love.

Families fighting?

Lord Jesus, I give you this fighting.

I give you this drama.

Please fill me with your love.

Help me to serve you.

Help me to be faithful.

You can pray for your parents to have a better relationship.

That's great.

But they have free will.

They want to treat each other horribly?

God's going to let them.

They have free will.

But you can pray.

Lord Jesus, I'm depressed.

I'm sad.

I don't know what to do.

Fill me with your love.

Fill me with your life.

He says, if you seek me with all your heart, I will be found by you.

That means we do have to spend some time in prayer.

It's not just, Lord Jesus, fill me with your love.

The Lord can heal our hearts from the wounds of our past by filling that part of our heart with His love and grace.

Christ's wounds are resurrected.

Our wounds can be too.

Right in heaven, you'll still see the wounds.

You'll still see the nail marks.

They're not gone.

But they don't hurt Him anymore.

They're resurrected.

They're signs of His victory.

They're signs of His glory.

Yeah, we still have the memories.

We can still have the memories of the wounds.

But if we encounter Christ, we can encounter such powerful grace, such powerful love.

We're like, yeah, He has triumphed in a huge way.

Yeah, that hurt, but His love was so far better.

So, God's response.

God takes on our suffering, unites Himself to broken humanity in Jesus Christ.

So He can fill us with His life and love in the midst of our suffering.

So He can offer eternal salvation in heaven.

And this isn't all there is.

God is just, right?

There is eternal life.

Someone who was tortured and killed as a martyr, yeah, they were mistreated in this life, but there is the next life where there can be eternal happiness.

And Christ opened those gates.

Jesus Christ established the Catholic Church.

to bring His message of salvation, hope, and love to this world.

It's another question, who started the Catholic Church?

Jesus Christ.

You can ask Siri, Siri, who started the Catholic Church?

It's going to say Jesus Christ.

Even Siri knows the answer.

The Catholic Church is also the largest charitable organization on the planet.

We do more good than any other organization on this planet.

There's 1.2 billion Catholics There's 250,000 Catholic churches, 400,000 priests, I don't know any other religions, like hospitals, orphanages, we have tens if not hundreds of thousands all over the world.

And this is a reminder, Jesus gave us a commandment to love one another.

We said that the solution isn't God just constantly cleaning up our messes so we can do whatever we want, we can hurt anybody we want, and God just constantly takes it away.

That would lead us to be very selfish human beings.

So what does God do?

God takes on our suffering, unites Himself to us so we can experience love and life from Him and His suffering, we can experience salvation, and what does He do?

He sends us out to go be His hands and feet, to go love one another as He loves.

I've said this before at the homily.

The vast majority of the problems of this world could be solved if every single person on this earth was a super-devout Catholic radically in love with Jesus Christ.

If every single person on this earth Was a super devout Catholic radically in love with Jesus Christ, would there be starvation?

No. We wouldn't let people starve to death.

Would there be wars?

No. Would there be slavery and oppression?

No. Ultimately, it is the solution.

And so we are called to love and serve those who are suffering.

God sends us out.

That's good for us.

Yeah, there's great suffering in Calcutta, but there's also this woman, Mother Teresa, now Saint Mother Teresa, who saw the suffering, who saw, you know, the average daily salary in Calcutta, I think is about 70 cents.

Less than a dollar a day, people are living off of.

Well, maybe that's changed in the last 20, 30 years.

like $30, $40, $50 a month.

But it is definitely less than a lot of what people make here.

And so people, when they get sick and die, people just throw them on the street to die.

They're just abandoning them.

They can't take care of them.

They'll just throw them into the street.

And so Mother Teresa, a Catholic nun, sees this going on and leaves the convent where she was teaching and starts a new religious community called the Missionaries of Charity and says, I'm going to start a home for the dying.

So I'm going to go out and pick these people up off the street who are dying, and they've got maggots all in their wounds and all sorts of nasty stuff, and I'm going to clean them up, care for them.

They may still die, but at least they'll die knowing love.

At least they'll die knowing compassion and not be abandoned in their last moments.

And she started many houses.

Thousands of nuns now have joined her.

There's a house here in Denver taking care of the Forest of the Poor.

I spent a month with the Missionaries of Charity.

It was amazing.

We would go out begging for food and we would give that food to the poor.

We would go to the jails and visit with people.

We would go down the streets and find the homeless people and help them, give them money so they could take a shower and give them some clean clothes.

We would give out food.

We would go to the different villages.

Yeah, Christ is active in these people.

You say, Mother Teresa, what gives you the ability to do all this?

She'll say, Jesus Christ, the love of Jesus Christ.

If I don't pray, I can't do this.

Or one of my friends, one of my families, or families I know from my last parish, the Davises, so they recently became Catholic.

They became Catholic about four years ago, three, four years ago.

And they have three kids, four kids, Four kids, and Bo and Alex, they just decided one day, they were like, we feel called to leave everything, sell our house, sell everything and go to Haiti and work with the poorest of the poor there.

And so they did, and they took their kids.

Bella right now, I think, is nine, and all the other kids are younger.

And they live, you can see, this is the average house.

And you see the impact that this is having.

Like, here's a guy who is blind and partially paralyzed.

I think his name is Tigi.

It starts with T, but I could be wrong.

I could be mispronouncing it.

And Bella, when she realized that this is Tigi's house, that he didn't have a blanket, that he was cold at night, she went and got her blanket and gave it to him.

Or I think of this picture.

It just sums up kind of what's Christ doing, right?

Here's this woman who's suffering.

You've got this little nine-year-old girl.

I'm just going to show up and I'm going to love on you.

Isn't that beautiful?

It's beautiful.

Or you've got Sister Stan, for example, in Ghana.

In Ghana, Africa, there's a lot of non-Catholic religions, a lot of non-Catholic religious people, and there's this group that, according to their beliefs, that if a kid is born with any type of deformity, They're basically thought to be demon, demon kids, they're called spirit children.

They're considered to be bad omens, bad, and so they'll just kill them or just throw them out to die.

And Sister Stan, the Catholic nun, goes out, finds them, and takes them into their orphanage and cares for them.

And cares for them.

It's beautiful, right?

That's love, yeah.

Christ can love us directly, and then He calls us to...

Remember, what's the meaning of life?

What's the meaning of life?

To live selfish lives only for ourselves and only for our fun.

That's not the purpose of life.

The purpose of life is to love God, love neighbor.

The purpose of life is to be filled radically with the love of God, to love God with everything, and to love our neighbor.

That's life.

That's happiness.

And so, yes, there's suffering, and we are called to go out and change that and bring radical amounts of love.

Because the greatest suffering is not physical pain.

The greatest suffering is lack of love.

I remember a time I got a phone call from a nursing home of a lady who said, Father, you've got to come talk to this lady.

She's not eating.

She's refusing to eat because she wants to die.

I said, OK. Obviously, we can't starve ourselves to death.

That's not good.

And so I went to see her.

And I walk in the room.

Her husband Husband is in the next bed, watching TV, completely ignoring her.

That's why she wanted to die.

Here's this person that's supposed to love her, completely not paying attention to her, oblivious to her suffering.

Yeah.

We live in a culture right now that talks about euthanasia, talks about, oh, people are suffering, just let them kill themselves.

That is not the answer.

That's tragic.

That's tragic.

No, pour radical amounts of love.

Remind this world that we're not created to be selfish.

We're created to actually pour out love on God and neighbor.

Make something beautiful with the suffering.

Yeah, there's pain, but they can be saturated with the love of God.

You know, it's been beautiful when I go to the bedsides of people who are dying and I see their family all around pouring out love on that person.

That's what it should be.

That's what's happening here.

Right?

Or remember that kid?

That photo, that kid in the hospital, was one of those kids.

And this is Whitney.

Now, when I met her, she was 13 years old.

Probably 15 now.

And she works with Sister Stan.

And I'm going to show you a little video about her in a minute.

And she made it her mission in life to get these kids over to the United States so that they could have a surgery, take care of them, recover, and then send them back.

And she organizes these things.

organizes all sorts of different support.

You'll see a video about her, how she heard about this little girl named Precious, who was born with problems with her one arm and her one leg, so basically looked like a stump.

And this girl's going to die.

And so she took it on herself to raise the money to bring this kid over and have the surgery, care for the kid, and now the kid's still alive.

That was at 13. It's one kid saving one person's life.

There's a billion of us as Catholics.

This is a picture of a mission trip that I went on to Guyana in South America.

I was looking through all my pictures trying to figure out a picture that kind of summed up.

Guyana is super poor.

You know, people have outhouses, they don't have indoor plumbing, the only water that they have is from what they catch in the rain.

It's a really rough scenario, really rough situation.

No electricity, they might be able to get a little generator from time to time.

And so we went there to help them, to try to not only bring them some food and some help there, but to also bring them Jesus Christ, because so many of them don't know about Christ.

And it was so interesting.

We would go up to people.

You don't knock on their door.

You just yell, inside!

You know, that's the equivalent of knocking on the door there.

And we'd say, we came here to talk to you about God.

Can we come in?

A hundred percent of the time they'd say, come on in.

Let's talk.

Because there's such a hunger for God.

And they knew it.

Many of them had been abandoned by their spouses.

because they would leave for months at a time to go in and find gold, and sometimes if they actually found gold, then they would actually leave their family and go do other horrible stuff.

And here we are, this little village, we're going to talk about Jesus Christ, and the whole village shows up.

No, the cross of Christ is powerful.

The cross of Christ is powerful.

Christ is the answer.

So, I don't have time to talk about the praying through the wounds.

I might talk about that next time.

Or forgiveness and healing and stuff like that.

But I put on there some lists of resources about answers to suffering and some charities.

Sister Stan's Children, if you want to learn more about that, you want to watch videos about that.

Mary's Meals, another powerful one.

This guy, just some Catholic guy in Ireland said, you know what?

Every kid should be able to have at least access to one meal a day at school, one decent meal a day.

There's lots of kids who don't have one decent meal a day.

And so he started with just this one village.

I'm going to see what I can do to feed this one village, get these kids, because many of them won't go to school because they spend all day trying to earn money for food, or they spend all day trying to work for money for food, or they spend all day just searching for stuff, and so they won't go to school.

He says, I'm going to take care of this one village.

And now it's, expanded and expanded and expanded, so that actually 1.2 million kids are getting a meal a day from Mary's Meals.

Mary, named after Mary, mother of Jesus.

Or Save a Family Plan.

It's a group, they work with families in India, where they're just giving them $20 a month.

$20 a month.

But again, I said, like, average monthly income is like $40, $60 a month.

So that's a substantial increase.

And you can sponsor a family.

I mean, who can't handle 20 bucks a month?

But that's sponsoring a family in India that's helping them get on their feet.

Unbound, same thing.

Christ in the City, here is a group in Denver that they go and they hand out food and they talk with the homeless.

Catholic Charities Family Mission Company is the company that the Davises work with.

I would say don't underestimate what you can do as a young person.

Oh, I can't do any of this stuff.

You don't know, man.

You can affect one life.

Maybe you can't affect millions, but one's worth it.

I would challenge the high schoolers.

You have four years in high school.

Could you do one thing to really radically change one person's life?

Yes, you could.

It might mean not playing so many video games.

It might mean not being on Snapchat so much.

But you'll definitely feel a whole lot better about yourself.

You'll feel a whole lot better about life.

So, we don't have time for questions, unfortunately, because I want to show you a couple videos.

I don't have time for the Catholic cool stuff either.

Oh, that's what happens.

Okay, so, we're going to say a prayer, and then we're going to watch the videos, okay?

They're short, so let's be over a little bit.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

So, Father, I just ask your Praise You.

Thank You for not giving up on us.

Thank You for sending Your Son to take on our suffering, to take on our death.

Lord, please help us to pray.

Lord, please help us to open our hearts to You.

Help us to share our sufferings to You.

Help us to seek Your love in the midst of our sufferings.

And please, Lord, pour out Your love, pour out Your grace, pour out Your help on those who are suffering.

Inspire us in any ways that You want us to help others.

Inspire us with any ways You want us to change lives.

We ask all this through Christ our Lord.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.