Contact Us Free Sample

Search

New user tutorial

Log In

New subscriber?

Create your password

Not a subscriber?

Subscribe

OR

Log In

Email

Password

I forgot my password

Sorry... user email or password wrong, please try again!

We’re sorry, but that email address is not in our system. If you are certain that you have entered the address you used to register for your PTW account, please contact us to confirm that we have entered it correctly in our system.

User Account Expired

Uh-oh. According to our records your subscription to Prepare the Word is no longer active. Did you forget to renew? If so, please click the RENEW button below. If not and you believe there is an error with your account, please contact us here.

My Account

Renew My Susbcription

| Sign Up

Home
About
HOMILY PREP
LIBRARY
Take Five for Faith
- Weekly (Until Dec 29)
- Daily (Starting Dec 29)
How to
My Account

Home
About
HOMILY PREP
LIBRARY
Take Five for Faith
- Weekly (Until Dec 29)
- Daily (Starting Dec 29)
How to
My Account

Search

Search word or phrase

Search word or phrase

Any word Exact phrase

Limit results to the following...

Sundays

Exploring The Word

Homilies

Homily Stories

Take Five Daily and Weekly

Preaching the News

Pastoral trends

Quotes

Tags

Question Catholics Ask

Results

Homily story of the week

08 Nov 2015 - Preaching the News for Sunday

Few banks offer them anymore, but Christmas club accounts were once popular ways to save for holiday spending. You put away a small amount every week for a year, earned a tiny bit of interest, and couldn’t access the money until November. My grandmother did this for all 13 of her grandchildren. At Thanksgiving, she presented us with our holiday money. It was the same amount each year and it wasn’t much, but to a small child, it seemed like a king’s ransom. (Although one year, my cousin Daniel suggested we get a raise for inflation. His request was denied.) Strings—of a good kind—were most definitely attached to the gift. We were supposed to spend it on others—primarily on Christmas presents for our family. And we had to donate a portion of it to a charitable cause; we could choose how much and to what, which was an empowering decision for a kid. However, this wasn’t entirely a lesson about giving. Grandma said we could also buy something small—emphasis on small—for ourselves. We didn’t have to prove what we did with it, and she never asked, but knowing that it wasn’t an easy sacrifice for her to save that money made us want to do the right thing. Source: Exploring the Word for Sunday, November 8

Authors Jennifer Tomshack

Generosity Charity christmas presents saving

Restricted
Featured Exploring the Word

17 Nov 2024 - Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle B

Most of us can produce a list of consequences we'd dearly love to escape. We'd like to go to the all-you-can-eat buffet and really eat all we can—and walk away svelte. We'd like to spend money like fools and not sink into debt. We'd like to live on the couch but enjoy the appearance of gym rats. We'd like to tell a lie and not be caught. We'd like to harbor selfish motivations but be known as morally upright people. The bottom line is, we'd like to be made of some sort of organic and spiritual Teflon, so that our actions never stick and make us accept the calories, the receipt, or the culpability. Back to reality: I hope you enjoyed that momentary fantasy as much as I did. The truth is, we're sinners, locked into mortal limits where actions invariably meet and embrace consequences. One thing that held endless fascination during the Apollo space program era was the notion of escaping gravity: to be suspended in weightlessness, to drop things that wouldn't fall. Gravity is a normally inescapable factor of our existence. What goes up must come down—often painfully. We would like our fortunes to rise and never fall, and the same goes for our feelings. In spiritual terms the problem with this world is gravity: that the law of limits abides. Nobody lives forever in these parts. And no one is perfect. So the sum total of being confined in mortality, jammed in with upwards of 6 billion imperfect people, multiplied by history, divided by probability, and subtracting illusion is, I'm sorry to say, apocalypse soon or later. Or at least that's what a lot of visionaries have suspected since the time of Daniel and Mark. The evil twins, sin and death, coupled with their soulmates panic and greed, have led to a sad legacy of rotten decisions. If nature takes its course here, the trajectory will head somewhere south of tragedy for sure. Rocket science won't solve this equation. What can help is to add in the theology of saving grace. When sin meets grace, we suddenly discover we have choices to make—and the freedom to make them. With grace on our side, panic and greed don't have the power over us they once did. Death stays in the equation but loses its sting to resurrection. If math isn't your thing, then stick with the poetry, which I agree says it best. Live in grace, and when the time of distress arrives you'll come through shining like a star. Hold onto the words of Jesus, and you'll have grabbed the one thing that remains when the mountains fall and the hills turn to dust. Related scripture links Examples of apocalypse in the OT: Isa. 6:1-8; 13:1-11; Chs. 24-27; Dan. 7; most of Ezek. and Zech. Jesus and end-times: Matt. 10:16-33; 24:3-44; Luke 17:20-37; 21:7-36 Paul and eschatology: 1 Thess. 4:13-17; Rom. 13:11-14; 1 Cor. 15:20-28, 50-56 Like a weaned child: Ps. 131 Catechism links Creation and us: CCC 198; 279-314; 337-349; 668; 2115-2117; 2415-2418 Adapted from a previously published Exploring the word.

Authors Alice Camille

consequences saving grace

Restricted

Take Five for Faith Daily

© 2025 - TrueQuest Communications, LLC. All rights reserved.

Website by ideaPort, LLC

Wait

Success

Error

We have detected that cookies are turned off in your browser settings. To ensure you have the best experience, we recommend that you change your settings to permit cookies for this website.

Get Help