Jesus Loves You (But)

My teen-aged daughter is, of course – by default – a Priest Kid (or PK for short). A while back, on a retreat down in the border town of Pharr, Texas, she met another gal, a PK, and they became long-distance friends.

Recently, she told me of a T-Shirt that this girl and some other PKs were marketing which featured, on the front in big letters: P. K.

And on the back it read: “We believe because we HAVE to!”

Of course, pretending to be a sober-minded Daddy Priest, I said, “Uh, no.”

BUT … really … believing because you have to is not such a bad deal.

Life gets a lot more difficult when we grow up and get out on our own and are responsible for our own beliefs. Scarier still is the thought that we will, at least the way I believe – We will some day be judged not so much by what we said we believed, but by those works which, by God’s grace, we did according to that belief.

Even the Saints, themselves, were not infallible. They, too, were sinners – strugglers just as we are. On this side of hagiography, we tend to remember – and rightly so – the virtues of the Saints. And yet, in their own earthly lives there were those who knew them differently.

There’s a saying: “Eternal rest with the saints … but you wouldn’t want to live with them!”

For the rest of the story …

The Orthodixie Podcast on Ancient Faith Radio.

The fabulously bizarre image is stolen from a portion of The Last Judgment — Image Source