Iron & Altar

"The one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it." - Philippians 1:6

This is the last Friday of the month, brother, and the examen asks for its one sentence tonight. Paul gives the frame for it before you write a word. I am confident of this, he writes, that the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus. Confidence, not anxiety. The completing was never fully in your hands to begin with.

A steward's accounting names what the owner has grown through him, not what he built alone.

My own good work started long before I had any hand in it, back with a mother who nurtured the faith in her children and a father who loved Scripture before he was even Catholic. It ran through a friend who kept asking me back to Mass, years I couldn't point to on a calendar, and a decade of formation where my wife held the house together while I read St. Thomas at a coffee shop table. All of that, worked on for years by someone other than me, has brought me to where this app and these reflections now stand. This work is my family's primary income today, and most weeks that still means trusting God for the day-to-day of it rather than seeing the whole road ahead.

Paul asks for love that increases in knowledge and every kind of perception, so that you may be filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ. Not fruit you manufactured. Fruit that comes through him.

Write your one sentence: what has the examen shown you God has grown in you this October, and what is still bare ground. This is the last Friday, so offer today's sacrifice for someone who has died, and say their name when you give it up.

Receive my sacrifice for the soul I am remembering, Lord, and finish in me what you started long before I noticed you'd begun. Amen.