Transcript

For the longest time, if you had asked me, What, what is grace?

What is God's grace?

There was a, kind of a traditional definition in the circles I traveled in, that God's, uh, unmerited favor is grace, that He shows you a favor you don't deserve.

And that, and that was certainly true, that His forgiveness, His kindness toward us, is something we didn't deserve that, that it came to us.

But as I began to understand the Catholic teaching about grace, I began to see that it's something much more than that.

It includes that.

But that grace is the very life of God that comes to live within us.

Comes to us through the sacraments, it comes to us through other ways.

But that grace is not just God's being lenient or kind to us, but that He actually pours into our souls something of His own life, something of the, the blessed trinity's life, inside our souls.

And if that's the case, nothing else can be looked at in the same way.

The very life of God bringing us not just forgiveness, but power, and peace, and transformation.

Without the grace of God, there, there's nothing, there's nothing worth having in life, like having the grace of God.

The Lord said to Saint Paul, My grace is sufficient for you.

And that is incredibly comforting to me.

And I've seen it play out in my life.

Um, with I hear people all the time say, You have how many kids?

How do you do that?

And I would always say, Well, they've come one at a time.

And God gives you what you need when you need it.

Now, the joke's on me a little bit, 'cause our last babies came two at a time.

But I found that God's grace was more than sufficient for that addition as well.

Um, it's It's so comforting to me to know that God's grace is sufficient, will always be sufficient.

It does not matter what the world throws at me.

It doesn't matter what my children throw at me.

Um, God will provide and He does provide.

Um, sometimes it seems, the task seems insurmountable.

It seems like my cup is going to overflow.

Um, but God swaps it out and just gives me a bigger cup.

The more He pours, the bigger my cup gets.

And I've yet to overflow.

I certainly understood that I was called to a life of holiness long before I was a Catholic, but the Catholic faith has really hit that home for me by always keeping before our eyes this notion of grace, and how God is constantly giving it to us.

And we see this most especially in the sacraments.

This call to holiness is also, uh, embedded within the Mass itself.

When we think about going to Mass, and how one of the very first things that we do when we get to Mass is, is to go through the penitential rite, to pray the Confiteor, to recognize our sinfulness and ask for God's grace so that we can be better people, reminds us that God has called us to live a life of holiness, to live a life in conformity with Jesus Christ.

And that's our great hope, that by God's grace, we will become more like Christ and be joined with him eternally in Heaven.