Love Song to a Beloved Friend

Hello Zeteo Community,

Hope all of you are having a fantastic week! I know my week this week is leaps and bounds better than last week. (I have been watching a lot of Downton Abbey lately, and am having a difficult time not talking like they do.)

Thank you so much for coming by to read the blog today. I respond to the prompting of the Holy Spirit in writing it, and I hope He blesses you with your response to His prompting to read it. 

God bless,

Olivia Fischer

Week Two: Love Song to a Beloved Friend

This week, the inspiration for the Zeteo post came from a reading in Isaiah. The parable is an admonition to the faithful, addressed by God to His beloved and often referred to as a love song. Which is a beautiful context for the importance of the message that follows - God stresses the deeply loving relationship He has with us, and why the resulting fruit is so desirable to Him. 

"Let me sing for my beloved my love song concerning his vineyard:My friend had a vineyard on a fertile hillside; He spaded it, cleared it of stones, and planted the choicest vines; Within it he built a watchtower, and hewed out a wine press. Then he looked for the crop of grapes, but what it yielded was wild grapes." Isaiah 5: 1-2

We are all vineyards, carefully planted by the Lord: the clearing of stones and planting of vines denoting the graces God supplies to us, while the watchtower stands for the Church and the tokens of His presence that He has placed in our lives by which we are meant to look to Him. From us, His vineyards, He expects good fruit, though we are often found to produce the opposite. 

I like how this commentary describes good fruits and wild fruits: It is sad with a soul, when, instead of the grapes of humility, meekness, love, patience, and contempt of the world, for which God looks, there are the wild grapes of pride, passion, discontent, malice, and contempt of God; instead of the grapes of praying and praising, the wild grapes of cursing and swearing. Let us bring forth fruit with patience, that in the end we may obtain everlasting life.

Of course, the Bible gives a detailed descriptions of good - the fruits of the Spirit and wild fruits in Ephesians 5: 19-23. "The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control."

Now, because we are human, we are incapable of producing these good fruits by ourselves, which is why God has set up so many means of grace by which we can obtain His help. As Father Jim pointed out, we have two ears and only one mouth, demonstrating the importance of listening, and of receiving guidance from the Lord. I read recently that there is no thorough change, in this instance from a production of wild fruit to the production of good fruit, without the presence of grace, which is the free and unmerited favour of God through salvation and the bestowal of blessings.

God has lavished His care on us, His vineyards, giving us so many opportunities for grace. One of these means of grace is Adoration, which Father Jim spoke on at the last Zeteo event. He began by explaining that we are all spiritual beings, and that we connect to Christ in different ways. For some, this may be through the rosary or the chaplet, to some this may be listening to Christian music, to some this may be Adoration - the importance is that we all discover how we connect with Christ, and we use this means to develop a deep, meaningful, personal relationship.

God desires so much more from us than good intentions and beginnings; He desires to help us cultivate a thriving vineyard, full of good fruits, the wild ones weeded out and corrected through patient prayer and relationship with Him. What are the wild fruits in your life that you need help weeding out to make room for good fruits? The one that stood out most to me was discontent, for it is easy to get caught up in what is not good, seeing an absence of blessing, instead of noticing what is good and blessed in my life.

It is amazing to me the difference that searching for blessing has had in my life, the more I look, the more I see - the beginning of good fruit where there was once bad. I hope to continue pruning, weeding, growing, so that my vineyard may not be found lacking.

Future of Hope

Happy Thursday everyone!

I came to the abrupt realization after supper tonight that it is Thursday night and I had completely forgotten about writing the blog for today. I am going to be building this weeks post from a post I actually wrote last week and did not publish. Ironically - rather, providentially, as I am starting to see all of our ironies tend to be, Father Jim actually spoke a fair bit on what I had written, at the Zeteo event the following night.

Hope this post finds everyone having a terrific week!

Blessings,
Olivia Fischer


Week One: Future of Hope

Right now I am reading the book of Jeremiah, and let me tell you, on the surface it is not a very uplifting read. It is the story of God's punishment of Judah for turning to idols and rejecting Him as the true God. The book of Jeremiah reiterates the just anger of God over and over, such as in Jeremiah 30:24, "I will chastise you as you deserve, I will not let you go unpunished." God threw the people of Judah out of Jerusalem, out of the promised land and into exile, to serve under the King of Babylon.

As far as the people in exile could tell, being in Babylon was to be in ruin. They had been delivered from the Egyptians into the promised land, only to be thrown under the tyranny of yet another foreign power. The truth is, they had deserved it - they had broken the covenant with the Lord, and He had followed through on his promise to punish them.

However, the exile to Babylon was also God's way of bringing the people back to Him, and so it was actually a chance for a very good thing. The people in captivity had an opportunity to turn to God again, to obey Him, and to trust that He would take care of them, even then. In fact, it is in exile, that God sends the message to them which we as Christians have all heard and love from Jeremiah 29: "For I know well the plans I have for you, plans for your welfare, not for woe! Plans to give you a future of hope. When you call on me, when you pray to me, I will listen to you. When you look to me, you will find me, when you seek me with all of your heart."

The beauty of this promise God gave to the Israelites in their exile, and to every one of us today, is that we not only have a future to look forward to, but that it was a future of hope. At that time, the people in exile were plagued by false prophets promising immediate release from captivity, but God was asking for a bigger kind of trust, a bigger kind of faith. He was promising the people a future - that He would continue to be present with them and to guide them, and that in trusting Him with their entire hearts, they would realize the fullness of hope.

There are a lot of parallels to the exile of Judah in the reality of living today. With everything happening in the world, at least for me, the future seems pretty bleak. As with the Jewish people in exile, God does not ask us to understand or know the outcome of our circumstances. He simply asks us to seek Him with our whole hearts, to serve Him and to trust that there is a future to hope for.

Something that Father Jim challenged us to consider was whether we truly believe that God loves us. There is a difference between knowing this with our heads and believing it with our hearts. If we truly believe with our hearts that God loves us, how could we possibly doubt this future He is promising us? As Father Jim stated, God surely has a plan for each of our lives, and if we are able to come to some understanding of this plan for our lives, it will certainly bring us to joy.

As Jeremiah experiences, this does not mean that we will not face trials, but that we are continually given a chance to trust that Christ is our champion, and that we will not be overtaken. We have a divine promise of protection - a protection that extends far beyond this world and our understanding.