23 March 2025 #rememberwhoyouare

Part of my regular routine involves listening to Jeff Cavins daily reading reflections and testing my ‘all things Catholic’ knowledge on the Hallow app. Now I’ve added their Pray40 Lenten Challenge and it’s quite good. All that said, I had a difficult time late last week; I scored pretty low on the Daily Trivia - which showed my knowledge of the Stations of the Cross to be surprisingly lacking - and more importantly, the Pray40 challenge with Mark Wahlberg caught me off guard. Not because the challenge was difficult, but because I was not surrounded by my people out here in the religious wasteland and forgot I was trying to include more silence-to-hear-God-speak in my week. Truly, I didn’t even attempt the challenge. It went in one ear and out the other, and the week played out as usual. Until Pray40 Mark asked me how my past weekly challenge went.

I forgot what I meant to do.

Those are hard words to acknowledge - which reminds me of today’s first reading, naturally, for I am again channeling my inner Moses. Our first reading opens with a simple line: “Moses was tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian.” Moses, a prince of Egypt, who grew up with every creature comfort the world could afford, trained in combat, and schooled in intelligence? That Moses? We’re so used to the fleshed-out Cecil B. DeMille epic “The 10 Commandments,” that we might not know that the simple truth is Moses fled Egypt out of fear – the Pharoah wanted to kill him for murdering a fellow Egyptian who beat a Hebrew. He ended up in Midian, married a hometown girl named Zipporah, took work as a shepherd for his father-in-law Jethro, then had a son Gershom, whose name means, “I have become a foreigner in a foreign land.” Our reading picks up here, with God reminding Moses of who he is and who God is.

Moses forgot who he was. So did I.

Sometimes, when we’re distracted by the necessary work of the world, we forget who we are. It’s the same problem that St. Paul warns the good people of Corinth about. “Look,” he says, “people have been wanting things that aren’t good for them since the beginning of time, and the Moses saga is a prime example. We are Christ-followers, and live a life where love, law, and sacrifice are uniquely intertwined. That’s who we are. Don’t listen to the culture, don’t listen to friends who don’t understand your mission, don’t be distracted by the noise, or content with the way things are. Don’t forget you follow Jesus. Don’t forget who you are.” I paraphrased, but it’s what he meant.

Jesus knows about our forgetfulness, since he created us and took on our human nature. He knows we need a little fertilization of a sacramental nature to remind us who we are, so that we will bear good fruit and challenge the world.

#rememberwhoyouare