Making Christ the center of our life

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

WE should always feel the need to always strengthen our belief in Christ. That’s because with all the things that we have to grapple with everyday, there’s always the tendency to set Christ aside and to fall into depending on our own human estimation of things alone or to let ourselves simply to drift where the currents of world would lead us.

Let’s remember that as we are reminded in the gospel of the Mass on Thursday of the Second Week of Easter (cfr. Jn 3,31-36), “whoever believes in the Son (Christ) has eternal life, but whoever disobeys the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God remains upon him.”

We need to do everything to make Christ the constant focus and center of our life. May everything that we do, from our thoughts and desires to our words and deeds, begin with Christ as the inspiration, continue with Christ as our main help, and reach its goal with Christ as the main guide.

Let’s convince ourselves that any way of being and acting that is outside of this loop would expose us to deadly moral and spiritual dangers. Thus, right from the beginning of the day, as when we wake up, the first thing that should come to mind is regain this awareness that we need Christ always.

And so, we should develop the practice of making a morning offering to Christ of everything that will take place on that day as soon as we get up from bed in the morning. It’s what saints and many other people have been doing to set the proper human and supernatural tone to their daily affairs, giving them a sense of direction and purpose for the day.

It’s usually done by greeting Christ as soon as one wakes up. The effort to give the first thought of the day to Christ is all worthwhile since it corresponds to the fundamental reality that our life is always, from beginning to end, a shared life with Christ and therefore also with God the Father, Creator, and God the Holy Spirit, the Sanctifier.

Our life, of course, can be described in many, endless ways. But we should first realize that it’s a shared life with God. It’s a life in the Spirit, a life of grace. It’s a participation in the intimate Trinitarian life of God. We have to remember that we have been created in love and for love, and that love should be the basic governing principle of our life, that love that is the very essence of God.

In other words, our life has to mirror the life of God himself, whose image and likeness we are. Since God is love, is self-giving, then we too have to live in love and in self-giving.

That means giving ourselves to God and to others. That’s what an offering is, what a gift is. It has to be given away freely, because as our Christian faith tells us, it’s when we give that we receive, when we lose that we win, when we suffer that we gain in glory. Besides, we are told that since we have been freely and generously given by God, we should also freely and generously give ourselves to Him and to the others. (cfr. Mt 10,8)

It’s a mysterious law, spiritual and supernatural, that goes way beyond our natural understanding of things, or our common sense. But that’s how it is. We need to live by that law, because outside of it, we expose ourselves to danger, to harm and to our own destruction.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com