I continue to ponder this weeks Gospel. This people and their stories are rich soil. There is a moment that stops me: God says to Solomon, “Ask something of me and I will give it to you.” It is an open invitation limitless, generous, breathtaking.
There were multiple experiences at Mass this week that stayed with me long after I walked out the doors, quiet insights that settled into my heart that kept unfolding. The Gospel spoke of the merchant searching for fine pearls, and suddenly the image shifted for me. I wasn’t just imagining the merchant. I was imagining the pearl.
Each day we live is a small reflection, a microcosm of our whole life. The choices we make, the desires we follow, the attention we give… all of it quietly reveals what we value most. And if we are honest, many days slip by without our hearts ever pausing to ask the deeper question: Is this drawing me closer to God?
“You were made for mission. You were created to serve powerfully. And you will never be truly happy until you find a way to lay down your life for others that engages your talents and abilities,” Matthew Kelly.
As a spiritual director, I often hold these words gently before a directee, not as a command, but as an invitation. They speak to the deep truth that each of us carries a God‑given purpose, a way of offering ourselves that becomes both healing for the world and deeply life‑giving for our own soul. There are many ways we resist happiness and this is one.
Recently I was contemplating Paul’s words in Romans 8:38–39 which ring with a kind of holy defiance: there is nothing in the universe with the power to separate us from God’s love. Not death. Not life’s troubles. Not the shadows that move through the world or the shadows that move through our own hearts. Nothing above us or beneath us. Nothing now or later. Nothing at all.
Deep within each of us lies a hidden design, a sacred blueprint inscribed by God. It whispers who we are and who we are meant to become. Like a seed carrying the promise of a tree, the soul holds the pattern of truth, goodness, and beauty waiting to unfold.
There is a truth so large beyond our tit‑for‑tat thinking that we almost cannot hold it. We are chosen as God’s beloved. Not because we worthy, ready or because we have earned anything at all. We are chosen because God chooses.
In spiritual direction, we move slowly, listening beneath the surface, noticing what stirs, trusting that God is already at work in the places that feel most tender or tangled.
So much of our world right now is filled with anxious questions around technology, especially around AI. The fear is understandable. New things unsettle us. They expose how little control we actually have.
I work around some crazy smart computer scientists and engineers. One of which is Luay Nakhleh, Dean, George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing, Rice University. He has me thinking that there is a deeper invitation beyond if AI is good or bad. There is a more honest and more revealing question: What am I doing with this thing and what is it doing to me?
The most nourishing things in our lives are almost always the most organic—the moments that rise up unmanufactured, unoptimized, uncurated. They meet us where our souls are actually hungry.