Only the Son

Yesterday morning, instead of my normal quick two minute drive to mass, I went to a different parish and had a longer drive.  The whole time, the sun was shining so brightly through my windshield that I could hardly see anything else, including the road.  I could see only the sun.  While definitely not ideal driving conditions, it made me think about how it should be like this in our lives when it comes to our faith.  What if our faith was so deep that all we could see was the Son? 

What if our gaze was fixed so completely on Jesus that we saw him in everything and kept Him at the center of our lives always?

It can be easy to let other things come into our view, taking our focus away from Jesus.  The voices and noise of the world around us, thoughts and worries about the future, the opinions of others, and much more, all can move our focus away from Him.  But, the more we are focused on Jesus, the more we will not be bothered or impacted by those things.  Because all we will see is Him.  We will continually live with the awareness that Jesus is with us and we need not be consumed by worry, doubt, fear, or what other people think. 

There are people I know who are so close to Jesus that nothing else seems to get in the way of their view of Him.  Additionally, those who see only the Son in everything are people who we can look at and see the Son in them.  We should all want to be those people, people who know Jesus is in all things and with us always, reflecting Him back to the world.  It reminds me of today’s responsorial psalm, which says, “The Lord made us, we belong to him” (Psalm 100).  Do we live with the constant awareness that we belong to the Lord?

When we look out around us, there is so much to see.  There is so much that we can allow to distract us and consume us.  However, do we see Jesus first and foremost?  My prayer for each of us today is that in whatever each day brings, we would see only the Son, shining before us!