Please Put Up With Me

Please Put Up With Me

Thursday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

If only you would put up with a little foolishness from me!  Please put up with me.  2 Corinthians 11:1

Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.  Matthew 6:8

Piety

Father put up with our foolishness until we show the common sense enough to turn to you to work out the problems we encounter in daily life.

Study

The Lord’s Prayer is the perfect prayer for what it is, what it presents and what is calls us to do and to be.It opens with Faith, Hope and Love.  Faith in Our Father.  Hope in the Kingdom to come is our great longing.  Love in following His will and not ours just as Jesus did so in the Garden. 

The Lord’s Prayer continues with the four cardinal virtues:  prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude.  Prudently we ask God to give us what we need for our daily life – not more than we need, but certainly not less than we need.  We seek forgiveness as we, in justice, forgive others when we walk all over their lives and infringe upon their rights. But also, we seek help in learning how to forgive ourselves.  We ask the Lord to lead us into a temperate life of restraint, not into the path of evil and temptation and finally to give us the fortitude to resist evil and follow in His way. We ask God, in this last petition, to save us from what troubles us.

In the old Laurel and Hardy films, Oliver would sometimes turn to Stanley and remark, “That’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EC1ajVYFh6Y  When we cannot save ourselves or each other, we know through our faith that God will be there to pluck us from the belly of the beasts within us and beyond us. No matter what we do, the Lord will put up with us more than Oliver puts up with Stanley.

Action

Jesus introduced the Lord’s Prayer as a suggested way for the disciples to carry on an interactive conversation with God.  How will you conversation with the Lord proceed today? What will you say?  What will you ask?  How will the Lord respond before you even ask?