Works of Mercy

After I had left life as a public official and followed my calling to the Diaconate, I found that my circle of friends underwent a major transition. I found that a lot of the people that were constantly in my life when I was in public office were no longer anywhere to be found. I took that as just the way life goes. A short while ago a friend of mine who was not particularly religious, and wasn’t Catholic, was dying and called for me to visit him. This was a little out of the ordinary as he was one of those people that I found no longer involved themselves with me. To my surprise he asked me to preach his funeral. He told me that he had always been impressed with how I never forgot my roots no matter how successful I became. He saw that I always considered myself as just an ordinary guy. He said he knew I would do right by him because I would speak from my heart. He said he trusted me to just be a regular guy telling the story of another regular guy. I had no way of telling him that by saying that to me he had already done more for me than I could ever do for him. While he didn’t have a specific faith, he did have a belief in God. He was a Christian who believed Jesus was his salvation, but he did not believe in churches. His faith was just a day to day kind of faith with him being as good a person as he could be every day. When he passed I did as he asked and found myself filled with the Holy Spirit that day and preaching to a lot of regular people just being as good as they could be every day.