Our Lady of Lourdes Church and School

A number of years ago, while an Associate Pastor, I preached one day on the gospel of the talents… you know the one… Jesus tells a story where the Lord is traveling and gives his servants different portions of his wealth to look after. When he returns, he settles accounts with them and two of the servants had doubled their master’s wealth, while one had done nothing with his. I happened to have two five-dollar bills in my pocket that Sunday morning, and on the spur of the moment, at the end of mass, I asked if anyone wanted a few dollars. Two attentive youngsters quickly ran forward and offered to take the five-dollar notes from me. I said something like “I wonder what you’ll do with the $5?”  The following weekend, after church, one of those youngsters came up to me and handed me back the five-dollar bill, along with another $23, in single bills. He told me that he had gone around to his aunts and uncles and cousins, offering to do chores for them, if they would help him grow his $5. So I shared this with the congregation, and at the end of mass I gave away all the money that had been given to me. This went on for about three weeks, at the end of which time we had accumulated close to $6,000. We had a conversation about it, and chose to fund the building of two classrooms at a school in a township outside of East London, South Africa, where a classmate of mine was serving in ministry.

The reason I share this story is because we didn’t start out to raise that money or to build a classroom, but what it led to was not only those two classrooms, but almost an entire school, as we continued to support the project for the next couple of years. Further, we didn’t do this for anyone we knew, because we didn’t know any students or parents, but we did it because it was something we could do that would make a tremendous difference in the lives of so many. Education is a silver bullet for many of society’s ills. Finally, it wasn’t something that we could do alone, but by reaching out to others and joining with others, we were able to accomplish so much more than any of us alone could have anticipated. It seems to me that this is the wonderful beauty of Together in Mission. By coming together, each of us doing our own little bit, each of us making the sacrifice that’s possible for us to make personally, we can accomplish so much. It’s as though God takes our little gift and multiplies its effect many, many times over. Everyone can participate in Together in Mission, each according to their own abilities. God is the source of all good gifts in our lives, and those gifts are given for the good not only of ourselves, but for the good of all. What will we be inspired to this year as we participate in Together in Mission, 2017?

It is a joy for me to welcome Fr. Jesse Montes among us today, as he shares some of his own personal witness to the amazing difference our participation in Together in Mission makes in the lives of people whom we may never meet.

God blesses those who share their blessings, as we well know from our own lives. I thank you all in advance for your choosing to be a light, for choosing to commit to being a beacon of hope for others, for choosing to become part of something bigger and greater than anything we might accomplish alone. May God bless you all for your commitment to transforming our world, little by little for the good.