Corcovado jesus (Photo credit: @Doug88888)

Devotional thought of the day:

 ⁵ Let your good sense be obvious to everybody. The Lord is near. ⁶ Never worry about anything; but tell God all your desires of every kind in prayer and petition shot through with gratitude, ⁷ and the peace of God which is beyond our understanding will guard your hearts and your thoughts in Christ Jesus. ⁸ Finally, brothers, let your minds be filled with everything that is true, everything that is honourable, everything that is upright and pure, everything that we love and admire—with whatever is good and praiseworthy. Philippians 4:5-8 (NJB)

Quite a considerable proportion of the people who go to Church read bad publications… Calmly and with love of God we need to pray and teach them sound doctrine so that they don’t go on reading those diabolical worthless papers, which they claim their families buy—for they are ashamed of it—though perhaps it is they themselves who do so.  (1)

It was once said that the one who controls music controls the world.  I think we can udate that a little – whoever publishes the “meme’s” controls the world.  ( A meme is a picture – usually put on DB or Google+ that has words written over it)

The problem is that most of the “memes” are of the sort that St Josemaria  talks about – the “bad publications”.  Bad because they lead to us rejoicing in sin, rejoicing in mocking, in backstabbing, in gossip.  They divide us, they wreck relationships – they encourage us to disengage from relationships and instead engage in distant criticism.  When challenged on them, we try and justify the caustic ways in which we express our opinions.  It’s as if we’ve been given permission to ignore the wise words of Philippians 4 – which talk about what we should feed our minds with, that which is true, honorable, upright and pure.

Instead we rejoice in this that tear down, and get offended when the target is us.

During this Lent, may we carefully guard our words, and our “share buttons”, and as we do – may we instead find things that praise the Lord who died to forgive us of these sins… and many many others.

(1)  Escriva, Josemaria (2011-01-31). The Forge (Kindle Locations 3445-344. Scepter Publishers. Kindle Edition.

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