Radiate Love
Radiate Love: Do You Radiate Christ to Others?
Dr. Edward Sri
Do you realize the people around you are depending on you to pray every day?
I know that my wife and children, for example, need a lot more than my human love for them. They need Christ loving them through me. But that can only happen if I have a consistent, daily prayer life. I do sincerely love my family. But I also know my love is tainted by my own pride, selfishness, weakness, wounds, and sin. My wife and children need more that what I can give them on my own. They need Christ’s love supernaturally working through me. And that comes from daily prayer.
How about you? Consider the people at work, in your parish, and in your community, the people you serve: do you give them more than merely your own personal skills talent, wisdom, leadership abilities, or charming personality?
We should use all of our humanity, of course, to give the best of ourselves to others in all we do. But the best of ourselves, actually, is more than ourselves. It is Christ radiating through us.
How about your family, your spouse, your closest friends—do the people in your life encounter something in you bigger than you are? Do they encounter Jesus Christ radiating through you?
Mother Teresa emphasized this point with her Missionary of Charity sisters throughout the world….they recite a prayer that contains this beautiful petition to Jesus: “Shine through us, and be so in us, that every soul we come in contact with my feel your presence in our soul. Let them look up and see no longer us but only Jesus.
What a remarkable prayer! “Let them look up and see no longer us by only Jesus.”
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if every soul we come in contact with each day—our spouse, our children, our friends, our colleagues at work, the people in the parish, the poor on the street—if every person we meet each day looked up and saw “no longer us but only Jesus!”
If we wish to truly radiate Christ in this world, we must be committed to daily prayer.