Totally Yours

John 21:15-19

Phrases that spoke to me today:
• do you love me more than these
• tend my sheep
• follow me

Applying the Word to My Life:
Yesterday I wrote about the small relic of St. John Paul II that I carry with me. Today is his feast, and it seems worth stepping behind that little piece of cloth to talk about the man who wore it.

John Paul II was elected pope the same year I was born. He was Polish, and in the Polish community where I grew up, that mattered. As a kid, when I imagined what a pope was supposed to be, I imagined John Paul II.

What I remember most wasn't a particular teaching or speech. It was the way he seemed to project love from right in the middle of the mess of the world. His faith seemed constant, undiminished by the chaos around him, and there was something infectious about his holiness even before I understood what had formed it.

Only later did I learn the story behind the man I had grown up watching. Karol Wojtyła lost his mother while still a boy, then his brother, and eventually his father. As a young man in Nazi-occupied Poland, he worked hard manual labor while the world around him was being torn apart. When he discerned a call to the priesthood, the seminary in Kraków had been forced underground, so he studied secretly.

The more I learned, the more I understood the faith I had seen in him. It hadn't grown because his life had been protected from suffering. It had been forged while he kept choosing Christ in the middle of it.

Then I began reading what he actually taught. The man I had admired from a distance began teaching me about love, suffering, vocation, and the dignity of the human person. I had begun with a relationship. As I came to know him, that relationship became deeper.

There's something similar happening between Jesus and Peter in today's Gospel. Jesus doesn't ask Peter whether he finally understands everything. He asks, “Do you love me?” When Peter says yes, Jesus tells him to feed His lambs, tend His sheep, and follow Him.

Love of Christ is more than a feeling; it is a call to action.

That was the pattern I eventually saw in John Paul II. His love for Christ became a life, first in circumstances he never would have chosen, then in the priesthood, and eventually in decades spent carrying Christ into a complicated world.

The little piece of cloth I carry once rested against the body of a man I first knew simply as “the pope.” The more I came to know him, the more I discovered that his life had something to teach me about mine.

That's how the saints are supposed to work. We meet them, learn their stories, and let them point beyond themselves toward Christ. Eventually we hear the same words Jesus spoke to Peter: “Follow me.”

Somewhere in our own lives there's a person to serve, a sacrifice to make, a truth to live, or a place where Christ is asking us to follow Him more faithfully. The saints don't only show us what holiness looked like in their lives. They help us recognize what it might look like in ours.

If our answer to Jesus is, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you,” then that love has to become a life.

My Response for Today:
Today I'll ask Jesus where my love for Him needs to become action.

ABOUT ST. JOHN PAUL II
Name: St. John Paul II (Karol Józef Wojtyła)
Lived: May 18, 1920, Wadowice, Poland – April 2, 2005, Vatican City
Feast Day: October 22
Patron of: Young Catholics; families; World Youth Day (co-patron)
Title: Pope (1978–2005); canonized April 27, 2014
Selected Writings: Redemptor Hominis — his first encyclical (1979), on Christ the Redeemer and the dignity of the human person
Read more: Franciscan Media · Wikipedia: Pope John Paul II