Pleasing Sacrifice
Today is my 31st birthday and though I still believe I am young in my mind, my body is certainly feeling every year I add to my life. Gray hairs start sprouting from my beard, weird aches and pains come out of nowhere, and general forgetfulness or fatigue are all signs of growing another year older. Birthdays are always a good reminder of the life we have been given, the importance of it, and how we should take care of ourselves so we can live for many more years.
In the second reading today Paul exhorts us all to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice that is holy and pleasing to the Lord. Let’s talk a little about what a human being is and then we will be able to see clearly what is meant by this verse. The human person is a composite of body and soul. We do not believe in the heresy that says our body is irrelevant or that it’s just a cage our soul is in while we are here on earth. We believe our body and soul are united. So much so that we believe our body is us. If someone were to smack you in the face you wouldn’t tell them not to hit your body. You would tell them not to hit you.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church in paragraph 364 states, “The human body shares in the dignity of ‘the image of God’: it is a human body precisely because it is animated by a spiritual soul, and it is the whole human person that is intended to become, in the body of Christ, a temple of the Spirit: Man, though made of body and soul, is a unity.”
So in order to make a pleasing sacrifice of ourselves to God we need to ensure that we are taking care of our body and soul together. One easy way I have found to do this is to mark both your birthday and your baptismal day on the calendar. On your birthday you can make some physical goals for the year on how to make the next year even better than the previous. Goals could include working out more, finding a new hobby, volunteering your time for a new organization, etc. Then, on your baptismal day, make some spiritual goals for the year. These could include adding a holy hour during the week, finding a new prayer, taking time throughout the day to consciously speak with God, etc.
Birthdays often remind us of our age and inevitable death, but this year I am going to try to focus on both spiritual and physical goals so that by next year I can say that I have offered myself as a pleasing sacrifice to the Lord.
From all of us here at Diocesan, God bless!
— Tommy Shultz
Reflection provided by diocesan.com. Reprinted with permission.