Evangelists are wasting time if people have to guess whether they are Christians. Our business is too urgent. There is no time for dropping hints.

We walk by a lot of small opportunities to bear witness to Jesus. Perhaps we could resolve each day to walk by one fewer. Perhaps we could decide each day that before 10 a.m. we will do one thing to love, honor, and celebrate Jesus that we didn’t do the day before, and then pray that that one thing will bear much fruit.

Not everyone who asked about Jesus’ stories stayed. If you come to Mass, you’re asking, but not everyone who comes to Mass stays – it happens all the time. People get baptized, or have their first communion, or get confirmed, and after that the next time they’re in church, they are the guest of honor at a funeral.

Nothing has ever been able to replace the family, and every civilization that has undercut the family, either by neglect or by trying to replace it with some government agency, has undercut its own foundations. Every civilization that has persisted in that has collapsed. The evidence is overwhelming.

God did not need to create the universe. God isn’t any greater because we exist, or because the universe exists. He created the universe simply as a vessel to pour His love into, and to be such a universe all its people have to be free. A universe made as a vessel for divine love cannot have people unable to say no.

Fear and hate are the problem. The only thing that solves that kind of problem is conversation – let them talk, and then deliver the good news of reconciliation and mercy in Jesus.

It is not enough to be similar to Jesus, never has been. Grace is never denied to anyone, but grace is something we all have to make up our minds about – and be converted – over and over again.

Mary couldn’t be just “found with child,” suggesting that maybe she succumbed to the corruption of her nature the way we all do sometimes, the way Joseph suspected. She could only “be found with child of the Holy Spirit” – never a doubt about the purity of Mary’s will.

The cost is Everything but we receive Everything, too. We receive the life of Christ Himself, the “pearl of great price,” and we can receive it every day if we want. Our lives, for that reason, always have meaning and purpose. We are delivered from nearly all confusion about what the right thing to do is.

Many churches and denominations today are disintegrating because theyhave abandoned the thought world of the Bible.

Spiritual suppleness and elasticity can be preserved, even deepened, if it is regularly saturated in prayer and reading of the Bible, rubbed in deep by the sacraments of Eucharist and Confession. Souls don’t need to be old to be dry and brittle.

It really doesn’t matter what the event is. It can be a positive and uplifting event like a marriage, a birth, or a graduation. It can also be a defeating and disappointing event – like a divorce, a death, or an illness. Connect it to the person and work of Jesus, and it can change the world.

Even apostles had to be told rather bluntly that discipleship is not about holding on, but about going and telling.

If we want to hear the voice of Jesus, really hear Him, then maybe we have to stick around the Bible-talk longer than Satan did, to learn its accents and figures of speech, to anticipate where it is going and why.

The problem isn’t that we don’t know what the truth is. The problem is that just enough people have been challenging all that, and we have gotten confused.