The Way Things Are

Prayer Points for SEDL

• Consider first that God the Lord creates all things at every moment. We tend to focus on “the Big Bang” at the very beginning, or on evolving life. But God continues to create at each moment.

• Even as we grow and mature, God continues to create me out of nothing. His passionate, creative love burns at the core of my self.

• God creates me in the concrete. God chose my time and place, my parents, my gifts. God keeps shaping my humanness, my personhood and my self.

• God creates out of love – that is, God wants to share His love, to have others to love and to be loved by. I am intelligent and free so that I can love, as God loves.

• In calling me to live my special qualities and characteristics, God planted deep in my self an original purpose – the concrete expression of God’s hopes in and for me. My life is to discover in myself that original purpose – what my concrete self adds up to – and to live it out.

• If I grow to be the person God has been hoping I would become, I manifest God’s power at work, God’s glory. For the glory of God is a human person fully alive. If I know who God is and who I am, and live out that knowledge, I will praise God in the morning and thank God in the night, and intend to fulfill God’s hope for myself and for my life world.

• All creatures have such an original purpose. I am so to live among created things as to reach my own, using or not using, enjoying or not enjoying others, depending on whether they help me express my original purpose.

• Yet even in this order and harmony, the Creator courteously leaves us with freedom. We are to choose whether to keep the rightness and justness and order. Where we choose not to, we wreak havoc on earth. God surely knows this. But God’s hope has always been that humankind would live out the recognition that God always comes first, and enact that recognition in creating our life together in order and in love.

• God’s will is our peace. Not the peace of silence and death, but the quiet, humming peace of a dynamic, wonderfully orderly love. This is what God hopes for on earth. This is what God hopes for you.


Source: Joseph Tetlow, S.J. (1989). Choosing Christ in the World. Saint Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources.

The picture of the Crucified Christ was taken in one of the small chapels in the St. Scholastica Retreat House in Tagaytay.