Skip to main content

Today's Mass Readings



I love it when the a daily reading from Mass is one that has a special meaning. But today both the first reading and the Gospel were passages that have meaning for me. The first reading , 2 Timothy 2:8-15 contains our Bishop's Episcopal Motto "The word of God is not chained" and the Gospel Mark 12:28-34 included the "Two Great Commandments", "The first is this: Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.The second is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these."

The first is meaningful because it is our Bishop's Episcopal Motto. If it means enough to a "Successor to the Apostles" to make it his motto then it should probably be a passage that I contemplate, perhaps I would learn something. The second from the Gospel is a great passage that I find really simplifies what I need to focus on during an examination of conscience.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Carmel Marathon 2020 Weeks 2 & 3

Training for the Carmel Marathon on April 4th, 2020 in Carmel Indiana Goal: 2:51 Week 2 Runs: 8 Weekly Milage: 72 Cumulative Milage: 139 Workouts / Long Run: 17 with 8 at Marathon Pace Performance Management Chart for the week showing my running fitness progression from the beginning of the cycle through the current week. The main focus this week was just building my milage a little from last week, about 5 more miles, while being ready for my first MP workout. I am pretty focused right now and I struggled some last week with wanting to do more that the plan called for. I really wanted to add in a threshold workout. Marathon training is about discipline and long term thinking though. I could have added in some threshold miles and it probably would have been ok but doing the plan the way the plan is written will get me where I want to go and will keep me feeling on track and help me from wavering in the other direction as well. I'm doing the plan, period. I ran my fi...

Running Goals or Running Goal; What is it That I Want?

The other day I got all caught up in setting running goals for myself for the rest of the year. After the goals were set, I found myself starting to worry about how I was going to reach them. Wondering if there would be time to sufficiently prepare for them all. My goals were to run a 5k in under 20 minutes, to run a half marathon in 1:25 minutes and qualify for and run in the Boston marathon in 2014. At first, I thought that setting and meeting these goals would make me a more serious runner. In fact, I thought that to be the "serious" runner I want to be that I needed these goals. However, while I was running the other morning I realized that first of all, I was thinking about how to shift my training to meet my 5k goal. Then I began thinking about the right approach to a 1:25 half while training to qualify for Boston in a full marathon a month later. That is when I realized that the ancillary goals were starting to consume my focus and quite possibly i...

The Rosary: Staying Focused

There are several obstacles that someone who has committed to pray the Rosary will face. Since the Rosary is a long prayer one of the biggest challenges I face is staying focused. If you have read my other posts or if you are just familiar with the prayer, you know that the mental contemplation of the Mysteries is the main focus of the prayer. So getting distracted really detracts from the prayer. Even if I am only praying 1 chaplet of the Rosary, it still takes about 20 minutes. In that amount of time your mind is bound to wander some. I have found several different things to help me when my mind begins to drift off to the worries of everyday life. The first is to understand that this is going to happen and be watching for it. If I am not vigilant I can get through a whole decade and realize I have not thought one single time about the Mystery that I should have been contemplating. So before I begin the prayer I make a conscious determination to be watchful of my wandering mind. O...