Have you ever made a promise you didn’t keep? If we are to be honest, each and everyone of us has broken a promise. Sometimes this happens in such ordinary experiences of breaking the promise made to God to engage in a particular penance. Or a promise to pray regularly. The breaking of a promise for no good reason is never good, nor do we feel good about ourselves. It just happens due to negligence, weakness, or rationalizations.
The breaking of other promises becomes much more serious and consequential if it involves breaking a promise to keep something confidential, or a vow broken in infidelity, or a commitment to do something that one just decides not to do. Promises are meant to be kept, and even cherished.
God is the Great Promise Keeper and has been such for thousands of years. The promise God made to Abraham, the Covenant, stretches into our own day and into our own hearts. Even after we repeatedly turned our backs on the promise to be faithful to this Living God, we sinned by making choices and living in contradiction with the promise we made at baptism.
Now is the time to re-commit our lives to the promises we made, rooted in baptism. We promised with all our hearts to make the God of Trinity Love the heart of our lives; we proclaimed our belief that God became human in Christ and we would follow this God man’s teaching; we promised to say no to Satan and all of his lies and empty “promises;” we promised to witness, publicly, to our bring followers of Christ. We PROMISED. God PROMISED.
God has ALWAYS kept his part of the covenant of Promise. We haven’t. What do we do? Acknowledge....be sorry and contrite...make amends... re-commit.... go to Confession, for no one is above the Sacrament of Reconciliation or Confession...keep getting back up after sinning... our God is the God of the eternal “second chance.” That’s a promise from the “mouth” of God!!!!
Peace,
Fr. Frank