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Being Missionary: A Call to Faith |
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| This missionary meditation was read at Morning Prayer during the U.S. Province's recent meeting in Nashville. It is written by Fr. Terence Conway, OMI, Director of the Missionary Association of Mary Immaculate, St. Paul's Oblate Province, Canada.
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Being a missionary means living with continuing evolution. By our very nature, we human beings are most comfortable when we have everything in place, when we’re in control, when God’s in His heaven and all is well. But God doesn’t want to just be in His heaven; He wants to be in our world, in our lives. And when He is, as when the Son of God “took on flesh” in Jesus of Nazareth, things get turned topsy-turvy. Being involved in the mission of Jesus through Baptism, we will deal with the tension caused by our natural desire to keep everything constant and the Christian call to “journey” through change after change, always progressing toward the final goal, life with the Father. As soon as we get it “all together” Jesus challenges us to move on, “letting go” of the security and “leaping out” in faith into the unknown. This doesn’t mean we should ignore common sense and quit using the gifts of intelligence, research, imagination and history. But it does mean we can’t hang onto the past because it is where we are comfortable and secure.
This is all very true for today’s Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Circumstances dictate that God is calling us to “let go” of the security we had in the 1960’s . . .
But, give up? Not on your life? We are to regroup, refocus, revision, acknowledge the gifts in each other and run, walk or stumble into the future together, trusting that the Lord is with us in His Spirit. And so we will e better missionaries and proclaim more powerfully to all the baptized the “missionary” way of Jesus.
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