19th Sunday Ordinary Time, Year A

"Lord, save me!"

Lectionary Readings of 19th Sunday Ordinary Time, Year A
http://catholic.pcentral-online.net/lectionary/19th-sunday-a.html

In this gospel passage, we see an image of Christ walking on the water and bidding Peter to come unto Him. At first, Peter was able to walk a distance. However, after seeing the strong waves around him, he faltered and began to experience fear. This doubt led to his slow sinking into the waves. As he began to sink, he cried out, "Lord, save me!" Jesus at once stretched out his hand and caught him. Then Jesus remarked, "How little faith you have!" "Why did you falter?"

In our faith journey, we will experience both success and failure, victory and defeat, sickness and health, poverty and riches, and all experiences that will either strengthen or weaken our faith. In those times when we experience successes, most of us forget that it is the Lord who gave us our abilities so that we may succeed. And so we become proud and and forget the Lord. When, however, we began to experience failure again, only then will we remember the Lord and like Peter, cry out, "Lord, save me!"

We thank the Lord for the times that He gives us the gift of faith - a gift that helps us "walk on the water". But we must not forget that this faith is a gift and must be nurtured with humility, service, servanthood, sacrifice and fear of the Lord. Sometimes this gift of faith from God will help us go on even though we see obstacles and even if we see all kinds of hindrances towards our life objectives and goals. But sometimes, we may see the difficulties and the hardships and the problems and forget to focus on God who can give us that faith that will see us through all manner of difficulties. Then, in our doubting, we sink and fail to do His will.

The lesson we are taught in this gospel is to always put our focus on the Lord. We are called to look always toward Him. He is the real objective and goal of our life. If we focus on the problems and difficulties we encounter in our faith journey, we will forget the Lord and lose our faith. Keeping our eyes on Him all the time through prayer and service and humility will help us "walk in the water" and reach our destination of eternal life in Him. So if we continue to keep to our life of prayer and our life of service to the Church in our work, we shall have the faith to surmount any difficulty and we will be able to do the Lord's will to serve Him.