Even though we’re not living through the Great Depression, it sure feels like it, doesn’t it? The headlines are depressing. The economy stinks. Businesses are closing. Families are losing their homes. Things are a mess in Washington.

If you’re like me, I’m sure you know someone who is having a really rough time right now. Someone who has lost his job. Someone who has been dealing with a serious illness in her family. Someone who has lost a loved one. Someone who is battling cancer. Someone who has a teenage child that’s bringing strife to the family. Someone who has a tyrannical boss. Someone who is feeling alone and depressed.

Life is a challenge and can very often be quite overwhelming. We all know people who are suffering. Family members. Loved ones. Friends. Neighbors. Co-workers. Fellow church goers.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could bring a little joy into their life and put a smile on their face?

Well, I would like to try to help. My name is Anthony DeStefano. You may have heard of me because I’ve written a few books, two of them for children: Little Star and This Little Prayer of Mine. And several for adults: A Travel Guide to Heaven, Ten Prayers God Always Says Yes To, and The Invisible World.

I’m not new to suffering. Over the years I’ve dealt with a lot of it. Especially family illnesses. Without going into any details, I can only say that it’s been a rough few years for me. During that time, I’ve done my best to cheer up the people closest to me. Sometimes I’ve been successful, and sometimes not. But through it all, I kept remembering that old saying: “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

So I stopped talking and put together a little book filled with adorable pictures of children reacting to all that life has to throw at them. Then I came up with some captions which I thought seemed light and inspirational, but at the same time had a deeper message—a message of spiritual consolation—and I gave the book to some of my family and friends who were hurting.

I’m happy to say that the reaction I got was always the same. Slowly, as they turned the pages, I noticed that they began to grin. By the time they turned to the last page of the book, looked at the last picture, and read the last caption, that tiny grin had become a big smile. And the look on their faces told me that, if only for a moment, they’d been able to put their troubles behind them and allow these children to remind them of just how beautiful life truly is and how much God loves them and cares for them.

It was then that I realized that I had to share this little book with others who are feeling down and need a quick spiritual pick-me-up. Well, the book is called I Just Can’t Take It Anymore! and it is being published by Harvest House Press in just a few weeks!

Can a small, slim book change your life? This one can! Pairing hilarious photos of children with beautifully simple words, I Just Can’t Take it Anymore will cheer up even the most discouraged people. In a lighthearted yet profound way, Anthony DeStefano, author of the bestseller, A Travel Guide to Heaven, conveys the essence of the JudeoChristian teaching on suffering, all the while making readers laugh out loud and sigh “Aww.”

At once straightforward and funny and yet deeply moving, the book depicts challenges we all face: “Messy” lives, feelings of loss, abandonment, frustration, and despair. Then, step by step, DeStefano gently nudges readers into seeing the whole picture—life with all its beauties, joys, challenges and pleasures.

“Sometimes people just need to be reminded that there are always things to be grateful for. No one ever has to suffer alone,” said DeStefano, a best-selling author whose previous books include Ten Prayers God Always Says Yes To, The Invisible World, and two award-winning children’s
books, This Little Prayer of Mine and Little Star.

If you think you know someone who might be able to benefit from this book, or if you, yourself, would like to read it, please goto book order page to pre-order the book from Amazon.com. Thank you very much!

- – - written by Anthony DeStefano

It is impossible for us to know all about God, because He is totally beyond our understanding. The only way to know God is for God to reveal himself to us. Ever since God created man in his own image and likeness, man has been creating God in man’s own image and likeness. Some of the attributes humans apply to God are downright false, and an affront to Him.

However, God has revealed himself partially to genuine seekers. There have been great sages who were searchers, and to them God has revealed some of His aspects. For example, Indian sages have concluded that God is satchitanandanityaparipoorna, that He is a being, intelligent, bliss, eternal and perfect. In the Gayatri Mantra, God is described as the support of our life, destroyer of pain, bestower of happiness, shining like the sun, unique, destroyer of evil, and divine intelligence.

Through Jesus Christ, God has revealed something astonishing about His inner life: that He is not a solitary individual, but a community, a community of three distinct persons who are equal and yet one through love. This inner life of God is known as the Holy Trinity. To distinguish these three divine persons from one another, one is called Father, the other Son, and the third Spirit. This is a tremendous and amazing revelation about God’s inner life, an aspect which we would not have been able to discover through our limited intelligence.

This unique revelation implies many things. God’s inner life is full of activity, the Father is turned towards the Son, the Son turned towards the Father, and the Love between them being another person known as the Spirit. The Father is outgoing, the Son is outgoing, the Spirit too is outgoing; reaching out in love everywhere and always. God reaches out to His creation, especially to humans. The Son becomes a human being in Jesus, and the Spirit hovers over the earth, especially guiding, inspiring and strengthening humans everywhere.

Also Read The Trinity Explained

The Holy Trinity thus becomes the model for all relationships, especially for every community, every family, every assembly. The quality of our life depends on the quality of our relationships, and if our relationships are modeled on the Trinity (three different persons, yet equal and related to each other in perfect love) life becomes a joyful and pleasant experience. Love is to be always outgoing, love is sharing, love is respectful, and between lovers there is equality.

The Trinity emphasizes that solitariness is hell and that individualistic selfishness is a curse, unbecoming of any human being. We are born to foster relationships. From the moment we are born, we are related to our mother, father, siblings, grandparents, cousins and the extended family. We are to grow in this relationship, reaching out beyond our extended family. We are to establish relationships with all people, castes, races and nations – which should lead to fellowship, understanding, mutual help and well-being. We are to create a family of nations.

No man is an island, and we all belong to the family of man, and to the family of God. The Son became man that we might become divine. If we understand this and accept it, there would be no more wars, corruption, and exploitation. This is the challenge that the Holy Trinity places before us – be like God, become divine! Becoming divine is an invitation to love, sharing, communion, community, self-communication and joy in giving and receiving. Praise and glory to the Holy Trinity!

Because we are created in the image and likeness of the Holy Trinity, we tend to create communities: families, associations, clubs etc. We try to reach out to others. But then sin comes in and destroys everything. Selfishness, lust, avarice, jealousy destroy whatever we try to build. We have to overcome sin if we want to be constructive.

The doctrine of the Trinity enables to understand how Jesus, a human being could also be divine, the Son of God. The Son became man without losing his Sonship, his divinity. This is very well expressed in the Preface of the Mass for the feast of the Holy Trinity: “You are one God, one Lord, not in the unity of one person, but in the Trinity of one substance. For what you have revealed to us of your glory we believe equally of your Son and of the Holy Spirit, so that, in the confessing of the true and eternal Godhead, you might be adored in what is proper to each Person, their unity in substance, and their equality in majesty”.

Let us pray the Prayer to The Holy Trinity

- – - written by Fr. George Kureethra

Lack of space for Jesus, was lack of space for God in the heart of the people. It stands for this Christmas too.

We, as believers, are once again being fondly invited to the banquet-table of a Redemptive Incarnation and in the garden of our heart there unfolds, like the fragrant December Lilies, a full bunch of reminiscences of this historic event. As we engage ourselves in creating cribs, setting star-lights, lining up, in newly sewn attires holding burning candles, at the church-courtyard for the midnight-holy ceremonies and preparing delicious edibles, let us pause a while and ask ourselves:

Is there a little space available, in our heart, for the Baby Jesus?

The effulgent flame of the Blessed Birth of the Lord is one that throws beams of light upon contradictions of manifold kind. We, fragile humans, can only stand amazed at each of them: the’ Millionaire-God’ becomes a ‘bankrupt-human’!; the Sacred One assumes the form of a profane transgressor!; the sole Sustainer of the entire universe, renouncing the riches above, takes birth in a mere manger!; the Son of God becomes the Servant of servants!, and above all, as the Gospel testifies, the First-born Son of the Creator-God is deprived of a little space to be born in, even in an inn (Lk. 2:7).

Bethlehem, that day, was exceptionally noisy with the preparations for Census. Roads and rest-houses grew overcrowded. No one there wished to be a host to another. Everyone had amply rehearsed to pretend to be a stranger to the other. Was it not for the same reason that Joseph, a poor country carpenter and Mary, his expecting and weary wife were left orphans there at that chill nightfall? Yet, disregarding the scorching sorrows ruthlessly offered by each of the slammed doors and sour-soaked insults, they moved ahead through those busy streets, looking for a square-foot of soil for the Nazarene.

But, neither a mansion nor a decent dwelling, on the surface of the earth, was set apart for Him, the Lord of the land, the seas and the skies! The Saviour-God, hence, was born on a grass-mattress in a manger! No door lay wide open for Him who came as the WAY; no inn gifted a little space to Him who was born as the TRUTH, and no emperors or mobs marched up to shout praises to Him who flushed forth as the Fountain of everlasting LIFE! There was lack of space for God. Blessed, of course, were those simple shepherds on the hillside to whom was given the fortune to worship the new-born Child and those breezes and stars in the sky that lulled Him to slumber in that snowy yet holy night!

The dark world of ours, today, is busy with scripting the screenplay of haste and hurry. People of the present generation prefer to settle themselves on the shore of the turbulent ocean of haste. The earth-dwellers, to a great extent, caught in the octopus grip of a deadly consumerist culture that degrades parents as obsessions, kith and kin as booms, relatives as abominable liabilities and neighbours as ill-omens, seem to be growing excessively fond of playing what one may call ‘dumb-dances’. The farther the human race advances in the spheres of science and technology, the less it becomes aware of its rapidly shrinking noble values and virtues.

Today our relationship with one another is minimized to mere phone-calls; acquaintances vanish at the flash of short smiles and conversations hide themselves behind occasional head-nods! We no more have either space or time at our disposal to host and accommodate our own near and dear ones in the inn of our lives. The twenty-four hours of a full day and night seem to be insufficient for the varying and hectic transactions of our daily living. Children of the present often stand empty of mindfulness and filial affection to look after and light up the setting days of their aging parents who brought them to sunshine and toiled hard to provide for them. A good majority of us is enslaved by our insensitive senses that ignore and take pleasure even, in the mishaps at our neighbourhoods.

There, of course, prevailed a time when our handkerchief remained soaked in the overflowing tears of our sorrowing fellow beings; a time when our hands grew stronger to help those drowning in the whirlpool of misfortune to get out of it; a time when our little huts were spacious enough to render asylum to one more homeless lot, and a time when the crops of compassion and care got heaped up in abundance in the granary of our heart! But how different are this world and its residents! Noble values are demoted; broadmindedness is as rare as precious gems; faith-life grows shallower; face of the earth looks deformed and the wicks of mercy in human eyes begin to flicker and die out!

People love to be content within their well­locked glasshouses built in isolated islands. Many of us, regularly humiliating and avoiding the empty hands and swollen eyes of the abandoned and poor, choose to conveniently take a different route. Narrow and shadowy corridors are very often our choices. The fast-multiplying epidemics and unexpected natural disasters pin at the pleasure, comforts and tranquility of every one without distinction. Financial crises and irregular seasons, with the havocs and miseries they breed, constantly keep pulling people forcefully into the sea-bed of uncertainties and anxieties.

It is amidst the over-influence of these uncommon phenomena that we prepare ourselves, in spirit and gaiety, for the nearing Christmas. If so, it’s an occasion for us to objectively examine our words, deeds and thoughts in both the resonance of our conscience and the lime­light of truth. Do we have space for God? Let us learn serious lessons from our faults and falls, generously amend our wrongs and debilities, throw the entrance of our heart broad open for the Lord who waits outside knocking (Rev. 3:20), and re-own a fleshy heart that will ever grow sensitive enough to love and help our fellow brothers and sisters.

May the One, who sanctified the manger at Bethlehem and turned water into wine at Cana, be born in the little cradle of our heart. Then, with Him, we too will be reborn as renewed creations full of finer virtues and holiness and consequently, the Feast of Incarnation will continue to remain an indelibly personal experience in the very core of our being throughout the days to come.

- – - written by Fr. Thomas Pattathilchira, CMF