“News Flash: Doctors Tell Pope Francis to Eat Less Pasta”
by Brian Flanagan
Second Sunday of Easter
Are you worried you’ve eaten a few too many chocolate eggs over the past week? You’re not alone. For me, it’s been Reese’s peanut butter eggs (I just ate four of them as a matter of fact). I’m almost starting to miss Lent again. But I’ll do my Easter duty and continue to feast for 7 more weeks 🙂
And we’re not the only ones who have been overdoing it with the feasting. Pope Francis made headlines again recently when his doctors told him to cut back on the pasta. Out of curiosity, I looked up the picture from his election day and compared it to more recent photos, and it does look like he’s put on a few pounds. But what is the guy supposed to do living in Italy?
It really is crazy to think that Pope Francis makes headlines almost daily, while most people two hundred years ago could barely tell you the Pope’s name, much less what he looked like, and certainly much less what his favorite pizza topping was. The 24-hour news cycle combined with social media have given us an unprecedented play-by-play of Papa Francesco’s every move. And we’ve gotten used to it. The last time we didn’t hear from Pope Francis for a week was when he was on a personal retreat, and even then he set up his tweets to be sent out automatically all week while he was away.
Because we’ve gotten used to this (and even more so with non-Papal celebrities), we might expect then to flip open the Gospels and read a play-by-play of what it was like when Jesus appeared to the Apostles after the Resurrection. Or what he did for the majority of the 40 days between the Resurrection and the Ascension besides appear a few times to the guys. But that’s not the case. We have bits and pieces.
Yet bits and pieces (mmmm bacon bits and Reese’s pieces…sorry…Easter food tangent) might be all we need. There’s even a line in this week’s Gospel that tells us that: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book. But these are written that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that through this belief you may have life in his name.”
There’s another verse in the following chapter in John’s Gospel that says something similar, which is actually my favorite verse in Scripture, “There are also many other things that Jesus did, but if these were to be described individually, I do not think the whole world would contain the books that would be written.”
We usually don’t think about that, and here’s why that’s a problem – we put limits on God in our minds on what he did then, and especially on what he does in our lives now. We don’t get a notification on our iPhones every time God does something in us, through us, or for us throughout the day, so we tend to not pay attention. If we did, “I do not think my whole iPhone could contain the notifications that would pop up.”
One way I love to pray is to journal. I’ve been doing it on and off for a few years now, and I have a stack of journals that I can flip back through and read about what God was doing in my life last month, 2 years ago, or 5 years ago. That way when somebody asks, “Hey, what’s the Lord doing in your life right now?” (by the way go get some faithful friends who will do that for you), you won’t have a blank stare on your face. You can tell them how God is blessing you in this, this, and this, and how he’s challenging you in this situation and that situation, and how he’s speaking such and such to your heart. It takes work to think about how God is working in our lives, but once we start paying attention, our life of faith becomes way more than just an hour on Sunday. So grab a pen and paper, open a word doc, or use a notes app on your phone. Every day (or even once a week), spend a few minutes writing about what God’s doing in your life, and pretty soon you’ll realize that he’s doing much more than you could ever keep track of!
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