Team Jesus

The Gospel reading for today is about a Pharisee and a tax collector. Jesus describes the Pharisee as a good person. He follows the ten commandments of God. However, God was not happy with him because of the way he treated other people.   He is only concerned with his own desires, needs and interests where he does not care about others.   He was religious but the way he carry out his religious attitude was because he loved himself and not God or anyone else.   The tax collectors in the Gospel were considered as the sinners where they collected money from the community and have a share of it.   However, God accepted and loved one of the tax collectors because of his honesty, courage and humility to confess his sins to God. The tax collector asked God for his forgiveness for all the bad things he had done. The Gospel reminds us that even if we have done a lot of bad things to other people or even to ourselves, God is always there listening and will always forgive us as long as

Whenever I stand in front, seeing all of your happy faces, I feel blessed. Honestly, sometimes I wonder how, for all of my inadequacy, I’m chosen to be here. I have always put it upon myself that I am unworthy and I tend to think that I’d rather leave the task of proclaiming God’s goodness to other people, whom I think are capable and know better than me. I never thought I’d be strong enough to speak in front of you, let alone deliver my thoughts about God’s words in the Bible. Before getting my point across, I just wanted to say after all that, I’m just grateful. After everything that happened before the first semester came to a close, aren’t we glad that are here? I am happy to be here, with all of you, with God as the center of everything that we have pulled through before arriving in this moment. From the start of the school year, or the onset of a career, or any new beginning we had, we became nourished by God’s word. Coming into this community, we are blessed to have each othe

“We are all wounded. But wounds are necessary for his healing light to enter into our beings. Without wounds and failure and frustrations and defeats, there will be no opening for his brilliance to tickle in and invade our lives. Failures in life are courses with very high tuition fees, so I don't cut classes and miss my lessons: on humility, on patience, on hope, on asking others for help, on listening to God, on trying again and again and again.” ―Bo Sanchez, You Have The Power to Create Love: Take Another Step on the Simple Path to Happiness We all have those times that we feel down, tired, stressed, exhausted, fatigued, drained, wearied, worn-out, injured, wounded, damaged, hurt and all other synonyms you could think of. Human as we are, we all had felt those things before and will still be feeling those things once in a while as long as we live. It’s inevitable. It’s basically a human experience we all have to face occasionally. As youth , I think all of us have exp

“Faith is a jump into the arms of God, even when all odds are against us, and if this faith is put into practice and tested in the fire of afflictions, it will steadily turn us into better persons and even give us power to work for a better world” The readings today teach us about faith. In the Gospel, Jesus compared faith to a tiny mustard seed. The power of the seed doesn’t depend on its size but on the life it may create. Also, the power of our faith doesn’t depend on its quantity but on its quality. We would be fooling ourselves if we think that the more prayers we say, the more faith we have. True faith is more than that. In the 2 nd reading, St. Paul tells us, “But with the strength which comes from God bears your share of the hardship which the gospel entails” (2 Tim 1:8). Through our hardships our faith is best tested. When we have problems, sometimes we tend to think that we can’t solve it or it’s impossible. For the past months, I kept whining about my studies. “Ka