Hope your week was blessed.<\/b>
\nJesus\u2019 teaching for this Sunday is not an easy one. But what part of His teaching is easy?
\nOn July 6, 2015, a man opened fire at an African American church in Charleston, North Carolina and shot nine people. On February 2,2016, Immaculee<\/u> Ilibagiza was invited to the same church to talk about the power of prayer and forgiveness.
\nWho is she? Is she an expert on forgiveness? I\u2019d say YES!
\nImmaculee grew up in a small village in Rwanda, Africa, and enjoyed a peaceful childhood until 1994, when the assassination of the nation\u2019s Hutu president sparked months of massacres of Tutsi tribe members. To protect his only daughter, her father told her to run to a local pastor\u2019s house for protection. There she and seven other women hid in a 3\u201dx 4\u201d bathroom for 91 days, as genocide raged outside. While in hiding, her anger peaked, but then she turned to prayer. Her father, a devoted Catholic, gave her a rosary that she used to focus on God and not on hate. When it was over, she weighed 65 pounds and learned that her entire family, except for one brother who was studying abroad, had been among the almost 1 million people killed. She also met the man who killed her family and after enduring months of suffering, she told him, \u201cI forgive you\u201d. How many of us would do that?
\nJesus says simply to each of us today \u201cI know it is very difficult to love your enemies and forgive them. You cannot do it yourself. Ask me for help and I will enable you to do what you may now think impossible.\u201d<\/u> We need to recall that each one of us is made in the image and likeness of God. And so, we can<\/b><\/u> do as Jesus did. We make the choice: we can be nominal or minimal Christians, fulfilling the letter of the law, but failing to be generous to others as God is to us, or we can be forgiving as Jesus taught us. Our God is Love and His incredible mercy and generosity is an invitation for us to do likewise aided by the Holy Spirit.
\nWhat did Immaculee Ilibagiza say in Charleston?
\n\u201cI just want to tell people there is hope. My hope is that people can see the power of prayer, that God is great, that this life is short for everybody. Everybody dies in the end. And I hope through my story they can unload their lack of forgiveness in their family, among husband and wife, children and parents, community people, friends who hurt each other.\u201d
\nLord, forgive us as we forgive those who trespass against us!!!<\/u>
\nLook into your heart, forgive and be free!
\nHave a blessed week.
\nFr. Tom<\/p>\n
Thank you to all those who donated socks for the sock drive, <\/span>it is truly appreciated. <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hope your week was blessed. Jesus\u2019 teaching for this Sunday is not an easy one. But what part of His teaching is easy? On July 6, 2015, a man opened fire at an African American church in Charleston, North Carolina and shot nine people. On February 2,2016, Immaculee Ilibagiza was invited to the same church…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":8835,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[151],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fr-tom","ctfw-has-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stgenevieve-stmaurice.org\/parish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stgenevieve-stmaurice.org\/parish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stgenevieve-stmaurice.org\/parish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stgenevieve-stmaurice.org\/parish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stgenevieve-stmaurice.org\/parish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8776"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/stgenevieve-stmaurice.org\/parish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8780,"href":"https:\/\/stgenevieve-stmaurice.org\/parish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8776\/revisions\/8780"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stgenevieve-stmaurice.org\/parish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stgenevieve-stmaurice.org\/parish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stgenevieve-stmaurice.org\/parish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stgenevieve-stmaurice.org\/parish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}