Baptism and New Life

Today at Mass we were privileged to witness the baptism of a new member of the Mystical Body, and when that happened, I was overwhelmed with such a sense of God's love for all of us!

I considered this perfect little human being; this flawless little life being offered by her parents to the Lord and the indelible mark placed upon her soul today. She belongs to God. She was given by the Lord to her parents and in turn, they have offered her back to Him.

Is this not beautiful?

I realized that shortly after I was born, my parents did the same thing. They were so grateful for the gift of my life to them that they turned and offered me back to the Lord, recognizing that I was first His child before I was theirs. And their parents before them did the same thing, all the way down the line.

Do you realize the implications of this, the very reality of this connection with the Lord?

We are given to the Lord and He places an indelible mark upon our souls...God recognizes us as His own and asks only a small thing of us in return...that we love Him and Serve Him all the days of our lives.

Each and every time we help another person, we are helping the Lord, for He gave us hands in order to do this. He gave us voices in order to serve each other, and by doing this, we are serving God. We are called to lives our lives as a gift to others for we ourselves are gifts. We need to embrace this reality and understand what it means in order for us to be able to fulfill it.

Maybe this is obvious to most of you, but for some reason I had never thought of it in this way before, but suddenly, as that baby was baptized, the synapses were firing off in my brain, and I began to make this huge connection.

I'm not sure I can adequately articulate the immensity of what I came to interiorly understand today, so my prayer is that those who read these words today comprehend them.

Let us always remember that as we are children of God, we must in turn continue to offer our lives as a gift for that is what we are all intended to be.