We know from the teachings of the Catholic Church that angels are pure spirits. They do not have bodies, and they do not depend on any activity or matter for their existence. Every angel is an individual person who will never die. We ordinarily see the word “angel” applied to the pure spirits who remained faithful to God. The angels who did not remain faithful to God are commonly referred to as “devils.”
Last Wednesday (January 9), Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, announced on Twitter that he and his wife of 25 years were getting a divorce. It turns out that two days before the announcement, a reporter from the National Enquirer notified him that the Enquirer was going to publish a story about an affair he was having with another married woman. The reporter wanted to know if Bezos had any comments for the story. A lawyer who represents Bezos apparently told the Enquirer that it was “widely known” that Bezos and his wife had been “long separated.”
For the past several years, Georgette and I have done what a lot of families do during the Christmas season — mail a Christmas newsletter and a picture of our family to our relatives and friends. When we started mailing the newsletter, it was less than a page long, but over the years, as our family grew with marriages and grandchildren, the newsletter eventually expanded to four pages of text (two pages, front and back).
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of willingly choosing to accept less freedom in order to become something greater than what we already are. When we choose to consistently give up certain freedoms, we become much more responsible, and we are eventually able to achieve more than we would have ever thought was possible. This is a critical concept that must be understood and practiced by those of us who are serious about becoming what God intended us to be.
Last week I wrote about the first step that a person needs to take to begin the process of overcoming his or her limitations, faults, and fears. That first step is to work daily at overcoming pride. None of us can completely eliminate pride. It will always be with us. But if we focus daily on replacing our pride with humility, we will eventually be able to minimize the impact that pride has our thinking, behavior, and reaction to others.
I want you to imagine that there is a cave that is located in a public park that’s about 30 minutes from where you live. The park consists of 320 acres, half of which is comprised of trees, valleys, and heavy brush. Hidden away in the trees and brush is an underground cave that only one person knows about.
Last week, I wrote about how the Mother of God appeared on six occasions during 1917 to three children in Fatima, Portugal, and asked them to warn the people of the world that they needed to pray and amend their lives. In one of her apparitions, the Blessed Mother told the children, “More souls go to hell because of sins of the flesh than for any other reason.”
A lawsuit was recently filed by a Christian-based nonprofit women’s homeless shelter against the City of Anchorage, Alaska, the Anchorage Equal Rights Commission, and the executive director of the commission. According to the lawsuit, the Hope Center, which operates as the Downtown Soup Kitchen, is asking the court to allow it to exclude individuals who were born as biological males, but who now claim to be female. The Hope Center has been in business for more than 30 years.