I have been thinking a lot about invitations recently. Over the past few weeks I have been invited to quite a number of events from parties, to trivia nights, to coffee hang outs with friends. I have also been on the other end of inviting people to different things throughout the course of the last few weeks. However, as much as I have done the inviting recently, I want to focus more on the fact that I have been invited. The reality that we all have been invited whether we recognize the invitation or not.
A few weeks ago our gospel passage was a familiar one, the wedding feast at Cana. We all know the story, Jesus and Mary were invited to a wedding, the bride and groom ran out of wine and Jesus performed his first miracle by transforming water into wine. I heard this gospel proclaimed once again while I was attending the March for Life and was surrounded by our nine teens in a hotel room for mass. In this intimate setting, I was able to hear this particular gospel story in a new way. As I listened to Fr. Jonathan’s homily he reminded us that Jesus and Mary had to first be invited to the wedding. That we too need to invite Jesus into the depths of our own hearts so that He might begin working in us.
It can be easy to think we are always the ones initiating and doing all the work when it comes to our relationship with the Lord. But the truth of the matter is that we have already been invited by Him, and our own invitation to the Lord to dwell and work in our hearts is simply a response to the unceasing invitation that was extended to us at our Baptism.
God chose you, and he is actively pursuing you desiring a deeper relationship with the one He loves, YOU. It is our choice to respond to that invitation and develop a deeper relationship by active participation in the life of the Church. Some of the ways that we can accept Christ’s invitation to a deeper relationship with Him are by showing up to mass on Sunday, by receiving Him in the Eucharist, by frequenting the sacrament of Reconciliation and by choosing to spend time in prayer. God is always inviting us into a deeper relationship with Him, are we willing to respond to that invitation and in turn, invite the King of Kings into the depths of our hearts?