DEVOTION TO THE SAINTS

The saints are often an untapped source of love, friendship, help and affection as we make our way through life. The Letter to the Hebrews depicts them as a great cloud of witnesses to Jesus who are all surrounding us and cheering us on, as the crowd in a stadium cheers on the competitors. The difference is, they are all winners and we are all running to be winners, too: winners in the race of life, in the call and challenge to follow Jesus as they did.

So, the saints are all “rooting for us”! There are the saints we know and the ones we don’t yet know, but please God will know when we pass the finishing line.

Try and find saints who had the same problems as you may be having in following Jesus faithfully. Many of the great saints were first great sinners. There are canonised saints who were once gamblers or drunkards or thieves or liars or sexual reprobates. They went through the mill as so many people do today, who hate the sins they commit, yet keep on committing them. At some point, they reached out to Christ, or he somehow made his presence felt in their lives, and things began to change gradually, slowly but surely.

Look at it this way: a sin or weakness is nothing but a potential grace or strength. A sincere search for Jesus will transform what now shames us into something we will be proud of on the Day of Jesus. Don’t walk through your inner spiritual and moral battles alone. No-one can change him/herself by his/her own resources. We need help! We need friends on earth and in heaven. We need the encouragement and inspiration they give us to lift our sights to higher things, to defy and detest the falls we make by getting up and rising beyond them.

So, get online and use a search engine to find the saints that are for you. They’re there. They’re waiting.