Hello everyone! Heyo! Welcome back to Scattering Flowers with Elise and Miles, a podcast where we read the daily Gospels and the Saint of the Day.
Let’s get started! Today is Friday, August 22nd, and the Gospel reading is Matthew 22, 34-40, and the scripture to reflect on is Matthew 22, 37.
And he said to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
Have you ever had a staring contest before?
Do you play like no blinking aloud or you can’t turn your eyes away?
Or maybe you’ve played but you can’t laugh and you keep saying things to make the other person laugh.
The way you lose is the first person that blinks or looks away is the loser.
If you laugh, you lose.
The way you lost is because you got distracted.
Your eyes wanted to look at something else or the funny thing or joke someone told you made you lose focus on not laughing.
Today’s scripture story is about how Jesus tells the people the greatest and most important commandment is to love the Lord your God with your heart, soul, and mind.
How do you think you can love with your heart?
That’s easy.
I think it’s how you do good things for someone.
How you think you love with your soul.
You love Jesus and serve him.
That’s pretty easy too.
But how do you love with your mind?
That’d be a little harder, but it’s easy to get distracted and pay attention all the time.
I think one way to love God with all our mind is to pay attention to God and to keep praying attention to God by reading our Bibles, praying, and trying to stay focused on good things.
Today is the feast day of the Queenship of Mary.
Mary, the mother of Jesus, is crowned the King of Heaven and Earth.
In ancient times, the mother of a king was often honored as a queen.
So since Jesus is the King of Kings, it makes sense that Mary holds this royal title.
We celebrate the Queenship of Mary today because she has such a loving care for our prayers and she prays for us to her son Jesus.
The feast day of the Queenship of Mary was established in 1954 by Pope Pius XII, but the traditions of celebrating Mary as queen goes back much earlier.
Our Blessed Mother interceded for us and she likes to gather all of us, her children, together in heaven.
I think ways to practice paying attention to God with less distractions would be to attend weekly Mass and maybe even try to go to daily Mass every once in a while or regularly if you’re up to it, and to pray when things aren’t distracting us.
Maybe go into a room by yourself where it’s quiet and not many things to get in the way, and just spend time with God.
Today we are going to pray to Mary for help.
We can honor her with love.
We are going to spend time praying with her, and you can too.
Honor her as a mother and queen.
Let’s pray a simple prayer to Mary together.
O Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven and Earth, intercede for us with your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.
Amen.
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Thank you so much for listening.
We’ll be back next week scattering more flowers.
See ya!