Father Tom Lam

           Growing up, I used to enjoy watching those award ceremonies on television, like the Oscars and the Emmys.  I got caught up in the excitement of guessing who would win, even in those categories that I had no idea about, like Best Foreign Film.  But somewhere during the seven years I was in the seminary, I lost my taste for them.  I still wanted to know who won for Best Actor or Actress, but I found myself fast-forwarding through the acceptance speeches. 

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             I have to confess that it took me the longest time to understand what Jesus meant when he said, “whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”¹  On the one hand, I admit, it sounds catchy, and so it’s easy to remember.  But on the other hand, I’ll have no chance of applying it to real, everyday experiences it I don’t know what it really means.  It seems a little counterintuitive…to have to give something up, just to receive it back. 

            Well, I think that this lesson is one of the first lessons that everyone here learned…As a baby, we were given toys, like a ball…and we had fun playing with it, throwing the ball up and catching it on its way down.  And if you’ve ever tried to take a ball from a child, the child will resist even if you’re trying to take it from him in order to teach him how to play catch.  A child has to learn that he has to first give the ball away in order to have the ball thrown back or returned to him.  Playing by yourself is fun, but not near as fun as having someone else to play catch with.  That is the lesson…that in order to build any type of relationship, you have to give something away. 

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          Have you ever taken a moment to think about how you pick your friends?  We all have friends; some of them are closer to us than others.  Friends are the people we rely on, someone we can trust…to help us get out of scrapes or to listen to us complain when the world treats us unfairly.  

          And I think it’s important that we know how we choose our friends because ultimately, if we’re going to have a relationship with God, a true relationship, one in which we trust God the way we are suppose to, that relationship between God and us has to somehow mature into a kind of friendship.

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          Have you ever wondered why good people do bad things?  (If you’re like me) you might have asked yourself:  Why do I gossip when I know that talking about people behind their back damages their reputation and makes me judgmental.  Or you might’ve asked, why do I say that I’ll find more time to pray every day and then find myself doing just the opposite, praying less and less?  Have you ever notice that our mind tells us what is good for us (“do not gossip,” “make time to pray”) and yet our body sometimes performs the action that is the exact opposite of what we intend to do.  Between our mind, that tells us what is good for us, and our body, which sometimes commits what we know to be bad, there must be a missing piece of the puzzle that causes good people to do bad things.

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