“Do not be afraid,” Jesus tells me in today’s Gospel. He asks me to have confidence in him so that he may guide me to become the person his Father desired me to be when he created me.
He tells me that if some fear makes me crawl up inside myself I can never witness to those he has put into my life his love for me; I can never be the yeast in the dough he has planned I should be. That doesn’t mean he wants me to be an evangelical preacher. It simply means he wants me to be open to him, to rely completely on him.
Every day I face difficulties, barriers to plans; obstacles to ambitious pursuits . But these do not have the power to disarm me, to strip my confidence in him. On the contrary, they can become challenges to confirm my faith in his presence.
Sts. Isaac Jogues, Jean de Brébeuf and their martyr companions, whose feast we celebrate today, can teach me how I should not be afraid of any real or imagined difficulty.
Today I shall ask them to pray that the Lord will give me the grace that he gave to them in their darkest hour.