Happy-Campers For Christ
Thursday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time
My dear encountered couple:
Jesus seems to have had the same problem as rock stars. Wherever he went he found he had fans who pushed and shoved to get as close to him as possible and touch him. He even had groupies - people who followed him around wherever he went and camped out in the fields. People who follow people often imitate them. The people we hang around with influence us.
Therefore, it is very important that we hang around with the right people. We wouldn’t want anyone influencing us to take drugs, or steal, or live outside the law. We don’t want anybody tempting us to sin. On the other hand, we don’t want to be the ones who are a bad influence on anybody else. It is easy for us to accuse others of hanging around with the wrong people, but it is not as easy to see that in some ways we might be the wrong people.
Although there were those who tried, Jesus could never justly be accused of influencing anybody towards bad. Since he was perfect he could change people’s lives only to the better. But we are not perfect. There are always things about us that can stand some improvement, quite possibly some essential reconstruction. It is important we remain devoted followers of Christ - groupies, so to speak - so that his goodness has plenty of chance to rub off on us. Hopefully, we will then have in us his goodness to rub off on somebody else.
“A great crowd followed Jesus from Galilee and an equally great multitude came to him from Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, Transjordan, and the neighborhood of Tyre and Sidon. They kept pushing toward him to touch him.”
Let us always be one of those people.
