Hey, Church Fans! We have the vid, but for some reason, it won’t embed. No worries, just click on the link.
https://www.youtube.com/live/9r-af7Qf5Fg
Hey, happy Good Shepherd Sunday! To get you started here are a few clean sheep jokes:
Information technology is one of the biggest sheep industries.
There’s always a need for more RAM
What’s a sheep’s favorite car?
A Lamborghini
I had a young sheep jump out from behind tree and head butt me. It was a lamb bush!
There was quite the incident on a sheep ranch in the Rockies. All the young sheep were on the side of a steep hill. The one on top slipped and felling into one right below it. This started a chain reaction. Pretty soon all 200 of them came tumbling down the mountain…It was a lamb slide!
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One thing that might be lost on us, but would have been obvious to his listeners was the image of the sheepfold and the sheep hearing his voice. Not so obvious to us, so it bears some explanation.
One of the most critical moments for a shepherd is the lambing season. I am told that as soon as a lamb is born, the shepherd will take it into his arms and begin to speak and even sing to it. He does this to take advantage of a biological process called imprinting. He holds the lamb close to him so that it can smell him. He sings to it so that it can hear his voice. From that moment on, that sheep will recognize his smell and his voice as the one that will protect it and keep it safe. From then on, whenever he calls that sheep, it will ignore all others and come to him.
In those days, and in many places even today, shepherds will keep their individual flocks in a common corral known as a sheepfold. At the beginning of the day, each shepherd will go to the gate and call to his sheep. His own sheep will hear his voice and come right out to him. These he leads to the green pastures. The others, not recognizing him simply ignore him.
A similar thing happens to us spiritually at our baptism. From the moment of our spiritual birth we are imprinted, if you will, and sealed by the Holy Spirit so that we can recognize him from that moment onward.
Christ, the Good Shepherd is calling each of us to follow him so that we may “have life and have it abundantly.” For some of us, that means a call to the holy ministerial priesthood. But how does one hear that voice? From whence does it come?
The simple answer is that vocations to the holy priesthood do not grow on trees or in foreign countries. They come from right here within our parish family.
What are we looking for in a young man who may be called to the ministerial priesthood. Four things:
- He needs to be a healthy, mature, balanced human being. It takes a real man to be a real priest.
- He should have a capacity for prayer. He needs to be a man of the spirit.
- He needs to be of sufficient intelligence to handle academic requirements.
- He needs to have a heart for service.
St. Teresa of Avila said so beautifully, ” Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world…”
By the same token, yours if the voice with which Christ calls a young man to consider a vocation to the holy priesthood.
So if you see a young man in our parish who you think would make a great priest, pray for him, and then at some point take him off to the side and say to him, “You know, I see the qualities in you that would make a good priest. I want you to think about it and I’m going to be praying for you.”
I guarantee you, if you see it in him, he has been thinking about it. Yours could be the voice that helps him save a thousand souls.
There are a lot of other voices out there vying for our attention, but there is only one that will lead us to salvation. Pray that we may all hear his voice and follow him into eternity.