Every Day

"You're the reason for

every good thing, every heartbeat

Every day we get to breathe" The Afters. 

Dear LORD,

Thank You for today. Today I say: "Good Morning, LORD!" and I pray to be worthy of Your Love. Please, LORD, today, and every day, please let me be aware of your Love and worthy of it.

Today, finally, was a good day at work. I finally got my test EntityManager working, and that left me so dumbstruck that I was in the position of looking at what I had to do, for the first time, instead of wondering how I would be able to do it. And with the revelation today, that I can use Entity instances directly, instead of relying on what will be in the constantly-reset database, I can now, with a bit of work, test business logic directly and accurately.  Thank You, LORD  for this breakthrough at work: it has helped me to look at everything — my job, my coworkers — in a more positive light.

Thank You, LORD, for giving my family a nice visitation with Aunt Roberta and for a pleasant family gathering following the Independence Day weekend. Thank You, especially, for delivering them there and for returning them here safely.

LORD, I am angry and anxious to get my technical indicators program and company off the ground and running. Please turn my anxiety to action. Please let me not worry the little things, but simply do them and turn them from excuses to steps along the way to success. I can be a person who goes to my daughters' swim meet and run a successful multimillion dollar company. I can do both and be a person who is capable, successful, compassionate and loving.

LORD, thank You for my talent and success at writing. Thank You, LORD, for these past three consecutive days where I've published a new chapter each day in my Catherine Halsey story-series. With each day that I write, I chip away at being a successful writer. Thank You that for in this I see that consistency yields good results, eventually. Please help me to be consistent in everything that I do.

Thank You, LORD, for my Rosary walks each day. Thank you for letting me set aside time each midday to do these walks so that I may break away from temporal and secular concerns and contemplate the Eternal for a half-hour each day, so that I may return to the secular world of work and do my work well, being filled with Your Holy Spirit.

• LORD, every day, let me show kindness to my family. 
• LORD, every day, let me write a new indicator/agent and then run simulations on Updown so that every day I have a measurement of how my business progresses. 
• LORD, every day, let me do my Rosary walk with You.
• LORD, please bless my family with another child for our family's happiness.
• LORD, every day, may I remember my family, and see something good in each of them, and say a kind thing to each of them.
• LORD, let me write something, 750 words at least, that touches a heart, brings joy to a life, and saves a soul, every day.
• LORD, every day, help me to moderate my appetites and to make abundant what I produce to Your Honor and not to Your shame.
• LORD, every day, let me work and let me be grateful to be working and grateful and generous with whom I'm working.
• LORD, every day, let me minimize the use of my car and use other ways to get to and from my destinations, such as work, or a quiet place to write, by bicycling, or walking, or busing.
• LORD, every day, let me pray a Rosary.
• LORD, every day, let me find something to laugh with joy at and let me share that joy with someone else so they smile and so that their day was better, not worse, for me being in their lives.

LORD, you put me here, today, for a reason. Help me, each day, to know Your Will and to do Your Will.

I ask all these things in the Name of Jesus, the Christ.

Amen.

"Here I am, LORD"

"Here I am, LORD"

So, yesterday at work, Dharni, Shishir and Anteneh looked pretty glum. This weekend the xxx batch process will be running, and it has to be monitored hourly (to make sure that it is, indeed, running, and not being bogged down or quit), so 4 guys, including Daniel, that means six hour shifts, day or night, regardless, throughout the weekend.

So I said, "Do you want me to help?"

And they said, "Yes," gratefully.

When God asked the heavenly host, "Whom shall I send?" Elijah responded, "Here I am, LORD," in response to God's call.

Elijah: אֱלִיָּהוּ "My God is the LORD."

But what was God's call?

God's call was to bring His message to His people. That is: to do His Work. And what is His Work? Well, in Elijah's case it was to prophesy. But why? The why was to bring His people closer to Him, to ease their burden, not because it was His burden but because the burden they bore was that of worldly concerns.

When I asked, "Do you want me to help?" I knew I was sacrificing my weekend, and, given the project I'm working on, I'm truly sacrificing it, as in, I'm not going to be paid for this, no matter what my contract says. And maybe, God willing, I will get paid for it, but we're all in the same boat in that regard, and moreso: Dharni and Anteneh are full-time/salaried employees ... all they get is a 'thank you.' Maybe.

But being a priest, prophet and king requires sacrifice. Nobody wants to do it. Jonah ran when God called him to speak His Word to the Ninevites. Good King George VI (to be) cried when his brother Edward VIII abdicated the throne to him.

Why?

Because to be a King means standing in front of everybody, straight and strong, but powerless to do or to change anything, just seeing the people you reign over throw themselves in front of enemy swords and guns to defend you and to follow your command, and because why? Because you hope and pray what you've sent them off to is the right, and not a foolish and terrible mistake that you will have to live with for the rest of your life.

Because to be a prophet means to tell people what terrible and bad things they are doing, and the certain doom they are facing, and not have them thank you for this 'Good News' but, instead, turn on you, hate you, persecute you, kill you, and laugh when nothing happens to them, because God's Word and Justice isn't like instant coffee, punishing you right away. It does, but sometimes not visibly, no, sometimes it takes 40 years of your iniquity for the Persians or the Romans to roll in and roll over your country and to destroy your temple and your culture and to disperse your people to the four winds. But you tell them all this will happen, and they laugh at you or ignore you.

Because to be a priest is, yes, to offer the sacrifice to God, but it's all day, every day, getting up in the wee early morning hours, going out to be among the people, serving them, going home, exhausted, and alone, no wife, no children, no friends (you're a priest, after all, who wants to hang with you?), waking up early again the next morning and doing it all over again for the rest of your life, and then have a parishioner come up to you after Mass and critique your homily: "Father, you were wrong to talk about politics: this is church, keep your religion out of the voting booth." or even: "I think you said the word 'very' too much, Father, it made your homily boring."

So you pour your heart out and people don't understand what you're doing or call you boring?

Priest, Prophet and King. All sacrifice themselves to the laity, the common man, who doesn't understand nor care, so gratitude? Forget it.

God calls us, each of us, to martyr ourselves, some: literally, but some, us, me, in little ways. He asks us to take up our crosses and follow Him, and the reward isn't what we're going to get out of it: no one deserves Heaven nor can 'earn the right' to it. The reward is the sacrifice itself. God calls us to worship Him and to be of service to others. By saying 'do you need my help?' I sacrifice a tiny, teeny little bit of nothing: 'my rights,' 'my time,' none of which belong to me, anyway. But in that sacrifice, I'm in service to others, an example of what Jesus the Christ was for me, and in so doing, do I save my coworkers?

No. But I answered God's call to service, giving up myself for Him.

I'll let Him save them through my example or through the movement of the Spirit in them. 

I'm here to do what God wills me to do. I'll let God be God and do the rest.