When I read the gospel for today, I have to repeatedly remind myself that Jesus is telling the crowd around him some of the signs that will occur before he returns. At first reading I find it ironic that He tells us to not prepare a defense when we are going to be persecuted, but instead to let God speak through us but then He tells us that we will secure our lives through our perseverance.

As I reread the reading and really start to reflect upon these two seemingly opposite statements, I realize that they actually fit together very well. Jesus is telling us that we need to trust in God; that He will provide us with words that are far better than what we would be able to come up with ourselves. But He is also telling us that we have to work at living a Holy life. That even though God is going to work in and through us, we still have to put effort forth; we have to get ourselves to a point in our lives that we allow God to work in and through us.

For me it’s hard to really let God work. I was brought up in a society that preaches independence and how you must be independent if you want to succeed. But God is telling us to recognize and live off of our dependence upon Him. One of the hardest things in depending upon God is discerning what is from God, and what is from other people and myself.