{"id":5671,"date":"2019-03-16T14:00:22","date_gmt":"2019-03-16T04:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/?p=5671"},"modified":"2019-03-16T14:00:22","modified_gmt":"2019-03-16T04:00:22","slug":"i-will-give-you-rest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/i-will-give-you-rest\/","title":{"rendered":"I Will Give You Rest"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I Will Give You Rest<\/strong><\/div>\r\n
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By Fr David Shehata<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\r\n
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\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u201cIn You I will find rest\u201d. Jesus says, \u201cCome to Me all you who labour and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest\u201d. And He continues and says \u201ccome to Me\u2026 I will teach you and you will learn from Me\u2026 My yoke is easy and my burden is light\u201d. These words are very comforting from the Lord, and the reason for this is that it comes from Jesus Himself, one who has authority and the willingness to help. This provides us a lot of comfort and rest. St Apollinaris, one of the early Church Fathers, posed a very profound question saying, \u201cHow is it that Jesus sometimes will say \u2018my burden is light and my yoke is very easy\u2019, but at other times, He\u2019ll say \u2018the path that leads to righteousness is very narrow and very difficult\u2019?\u201d Fortunately, St Apollinaris also answers this dilemma\u2026 those people who may be careless in their spiritual life\u2026 people who do not prioritise the Lord, or a Christian way of living, walk a very narrow path, one that seems very burdensome and difficult. And yet, for those of us who are zealous and do want to prioritise the Lord and live a Christian life, the task\u2019s and instructions given to us by the Lord become easy and a pleasure to follow\u2026 become very light with Him.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
Everyone carries a burden, whether it be work or family related. Make no mistake, despite the exclusively happy facades of people we may see on social media, we all have problems that burden us. Yet how is it, that some people walk through these problems, through life, being perfectly ok, while other people are destroyed by these difficulties? Truly, the common thread that runs through the people who get through their problems, and move from success to success, is this element of hope and faith in the Lord. The element of faith in this particular verse. When Jesus says to us, \u201cCome to Me ALL..\u201d, there\u2019s no prerequisites. It\u2019s not only come to Me if you think your worthy, or pray this many hours a day, or only if you come to Church for this amount of time\u2026 not at all. \u201cCome to Me ALL, you who are burdened\u201d.There\u2019s a few stories that this reminds me of. One time Fr Thomas Hopko, a really beautiful man, said a story once, of a little girl with her father. Her father had given her a present\u2026 a necklace. And she loved it. It was a diamond necklace, fake of course, just made of plastic, but it looked gold\u2026 and so she loved this necklace. She thought it was so pretty and beautiful. And her dad used to put her to sleep. One time, as he was putting her to sleep he said to her, \u201cPlease give me this necklace\u201d and she refused. So he said, \u201cthat\u2019s ok, no worries\u201d. Then the next night he was putting her to bed, and he asked again \u201ccan you give me that necklace?\u201d, but she still replied, \u201cno dad, I really love it\u2026 I don\u2019t want to part ways with it\u201d. So he said again, \u201cthat\u2019s ok\u201d. The third day he asked her and she started crying, she said \u201cyou know that I love this necklace, why are you asking me to get rid of it? Why you asking me to give it away? I really love it\u201d. And so he said to her, \u201cDon\u2019t cry, I don\u2019t want you to cry. Just give it to me when your ready, and I have something better for you\u201d. She said, \u201cbut there\u2019s nothing that could possibly be better that this\u201d. He replied, \u201cthat\u2019s ok, when you\u2019re ready\u201d. This kept going on for days and days and weeks. Until one day, as he was putting her to sleep, he asked, \u201ccan I have the necklace?\u201d With tears in her she gave it to him. He said, \u201cwhy are you crying\u201d, and she responded, \u201cyou know why I\u2019m crying, I really love it\u201d. He said, \u201cwell maybe you won\u2019t be crying anymore after you see what I have prepared for you\u201d. She still said, \u201cthere could be nothing better than this necklace\u201d. So out of his pocket, it was there the whole time, he pulled a jewerelly box. Inside, there was a real gold necklace, the real deal. And he gave it to her and said, \u201cI had this ready for you all along\u201d.\r\n\r\nIn a way, it makes us realise that many times we\u2019re going through burdens and problems, and it feels like we are the ones who need to fix the problem\u2026 we are the ones that need to solve it. And I feel, that these are the times we have to let go and tell the Lord, \u201cYou are the one who is going to fix this problem, it\u2019s Your burden, not mine\u201d. Fr Thomas Hopko once said that when we\u2019re praying to God, we tell Him, \u201cLord we are weak, we\u2019re rubbish\u2026 but we are Your rubbish. We are weak, but You are the one Who can draw out the strength in our weakness\u201d.\r\n
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I Will Give You Rest By Fr David Shehata \u201cIn You I will find rest\u201d. Jesus says, \u201cCome to Me all you who labour and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest\u201d. And He continues and says \u201ccome to Me\u2026 I will teach you and you will learn from Me\u2026 My yoke is … Continue reading “I Will Give You Rest”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":5672,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5671"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5673,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5671\/revisions\/5673"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}