Happy Lent, Friends,


Have you ever seen and wondered about the meaning of the rainbow? Today's first reading tells us that it is the covenant God made with Noah where God simply promises that He would never destroy the world by flood again. As you may know, a covenant is a serious commitment or promise between two people or two parties make to each other. It states the eexpectations they have of each other. So in this way God chose to enter into a relationship with His people. He makes all the promises and asks nothing of Noah and his family in return. In the coming weeks we are going to learn that God does have expectations of us. Every time we come to Mass, we renew this covenant God has made with us. Because  of our baptism, God promises us salvation and eternal life through Jesus Christ, and we commit ourselves to loving and obeying  him.


​Fr. Alex Ureña

Hello Friends,

​We are about to start the Lenten journey on ash Wednesday and continue with it till Easter. The Lenten journey calls us to repentance, to turn away from all those things that separate us from the love of God and to return to His mercy, justice, and reconciliation. This year, we start Lent on a secular “holiday” (Valentine's Day). So this is a day in which people celebrate the gift of love. Those bonds of love which people create among themselves are everlasting, they last beyond this earthly life. This is the love that God is inviting us to when He asks us to return to Him. He gives us specific instructions: “Take care not to perform righteous deeds in order that people may see them; otherwise, you will have no recompense from your heavenly Father.” In the gospel of Ash Wednesday you will hear part of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus instructs his listeners on the right Christian attitude and disposition toward prayer, fasting and almsgiving. If we pay attention to these, that is a sign that our hearts are turning to our loving God!

Fr. Alex Ureña

Hello Friends,

     
​Today in our first reading we hear Job lamenting his suffering. Depression really is evident when Job says, "I shall not see happiness again." Hopelessness is one of the major characteristics of depression. Whether Job was a real person or not, no one can say for sure, but the Book of Job definitely expresses a feeling we've all felt at times, that life is unfair. At the time this book was written (about 400/500 years before Christ), the view God's people had was that if we are good, all will go well, and if we're not, all kinds of terrible things will happen to us. We all know life doesn't always work that way. The Book of Job probes this problem without coming to a satisfactory answer. The author could only conclude God somehow must know what He is doing because we do not. However, even though Job despaired of ever being happy, his misfortunes were reversed in the end and he did die happy.
 

​Fr. Alex Ureña