Developing the urge to reach out

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

“JESUS appointed 72 other disciples whom he sent ahead of him in pairs to every town and place he intended to visit. He said to them, ‘The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few; so, ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest. Go on your way.’” (Lk 10,1-3)

With this gospel passage, it is quite clear that Christ wants us to go out and reach out to as many people as we can for the purpose of bringing them to their—and our—ultimate goal in life.

We have to make a loud and strong proclamation of this truth of our faith to awaken everyone of us of this need and duty. We should feel this call of Christ deeply and abidingly, making use of everything in our life, of every situation we can be in, to carry out this will of his.

Especially these days when we can see a growing segment of the people all over the world drifting away from God and from religion, we should act on this call of Christ. Even in our country which we can say is quite Catholic, Christian or religious in different ways, we cannot deny that we can also see many people who are practically cold, lukewarm if not dead spiritually.

There is a lot of work to be done. And what can reassure us in this duty is that practically everything in our life can be an occasion to reach out, because even if we happen to be isolated, we still can reach out to others by praying and offering sacrifices for them which can be done anytime anywhere.

And now with the new powerful technologies we have, this duty can be more easily carried out. We don’t have to travel far to reach out to those in far-away places. The mission land need not be in the other side of the globe. It can be right where we are and where the light of faith is practically lost.

We should just sharpen our apostolic zeal and develop the proper skills, like training ourselves to be more friendly, warm and open to everyone, and to be more creative in adapting ourselves to how others are, etc.

We can always try to develop a certain gift of gab so we can talk to different kinds of people in the same wavelength. We should learn how to speak with the young ones with their slangs and all that, as well as with the intellectuals, the manual workers, those in the mainstream of society and those in the peripheries, etc., in an engaging way.

We can hack this if we would just strengthen our intimate relation with Christ. Let’s always remember that our apostolic zeal can only be the overflow of our spiritual life. If our belief and love for Christ is strong, the natural effect is for us to reach out to others, just like what Christ did and continues to do with us.

Yes, the zeal we ought to have in reaching out to everyone can only be the effect of Christ’s power playing in us. We cannot rely simply on our own powers. And on the part of Christ, he has given us everything we need for this purpose already. He is eager to share his power with us.

We should just develop the urge to reach out to everyone!

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com