Run so as to Win!
Pope Francis reminds us that the goal of our life is to know Jesus and to follow him. He said, “Only a personal encounter with Jesus generates a path of faith and of discipleship. We can have many experiences, do many things, establish relations with many persons, but only the meeting with Jesus, in the hour that God knows, can give full meaning to our life and make our projects and our initiatives fruitful.”
We are invited to strive for excellence personally as well as inviting our students to do the same. One of the dangers that we run into as Catholic schools is, what sort of expectations do we set for our students? Do we believe that they have “a real capacity for holiness?
Pope John Paul II exhorted the Youth of the World in Rome in the Year 2000:
“It is Jesus you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your heart’s most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.”
Students will rise to the high calling if we invite them. Let us have the boldness to call them to greatness and not mediocrity. May we model an authentic life of holiness ourselves to be shining examples to the students that we serve.