A great aid on my journey of life

By Paul Amrhein in Passing Through, Paul served in the United States Air Force for 31 years and worked as a licensed Realtor for 15 years.

For those of you who have read my previous blogs you'll quickly note that I've been participating in the monthly 3rd Saturday Opus Dei "Morning of Recollections" sporadically for nearly two years. Though I believe I am not called to be an Opus Dei member--numerary nor supernumerary, I believe the movement is beneficial to my spiritual development and I plan to continue to support the movement as a cooperator.

I find the emphasis of the movement of encouraging people to recognize what our daily activities potentially afford when accomplished to the best of our ability for God and our neighbor, and of being a consistent Christian throughout each day, regardless of the environment a great aid on my journey of life.

The meditations and examination of consciences offered at the Morning of Recollections are consistently provocative in the positive sense. Last Saturday for example one meditation provided by the priest dealt with "formation". What he reflected on was that the three years Jesus of public life not only showed who Jesus was, provided a platform for Him to preach, perform miracles and complete His mission salvation; it was also a period of formation for the apostles under His tutelage who followed Him. And even after three years of formation under this tutelage, the Gospel illustrates how they continued to falter. This is encouraging to us, that as we are being formed (transformed) we should never give up and if we do, like the apostles we too will succeed in "winning the race".

The meditation by the lay speaker dealt with the virtue of "fortitude" and the difficulty many of us have with this virtue. How many of us remain faithful to our principles when obstacles arise?

In a word after each of these Mornings of Recollection, I am inspired and drawn closer to the Lord, endeavoring to follow Him along the road He wants.

As an aside--two things. What is also inspiring to me is to be in the midst of 75 or so men, the majority between the ages of 25 and 55 years who are striving to be filled/transformed by our Lord. One other thing, I suggest that anyone who believes they may be interested in getting involved with Opus Dei that they read about the movement. I suggest a person read BOTH critical and favorable articles and books on Opus Dei and pray for the guidance of Holy Spirit.