March 18, 2025 – Day Twelve
The Lord consoles us and refashions us in hope so that we might continue on.
~ Pope Francis
Ponder:
When have I felt the presence or absence of God?
Pray:
God of hope, help me always to see the open door or the hallways of promise instead of the blank wall!
Reflection from Maureen Dufour:
In Joan Chittister’s book, Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, Joan shares some profound insights on what it means to hope in the face of adversity.
She points us to the story of Jacob wrestling with an angel of God in the book of Genesis 32. 22-32, and invites us to reflect on how God may have entered into a traumatic experience that wounded us.
Through Jacob’s story, Joan came to understand “both the cycle of struggle and the seeds of hope” that she was wrestling with in her own life. For her, hope was an intrinsic part of the struggle. She learned that hope had to be about how we deal with the struggles that will inevitably come our way.
Our encounters with the living God will mark us and transform us, if we learn to embrace the struggles; for as Joan wrote in the book she signed for me, “that is what makes us all new.”
Questions for consideration:
Can you name a time in your life that has become a benchmark for you, a time when you realized that you had more strength, more resilience, more courage, more than what you thought you could possibly give and yet you found what you needed within, to do what needed to be done?
Has your recognition of this experience, allowed you to move forward in more recent times, when you may have doubted your ability to do so?
Excerpts used with permission from Twenty-Third Publications.