Looking Good

By Tom Ponchak

My girls were watching the Oscars tonight and Clare (8 yrs old) said she thought Best Supporting Actor winner Jared Leto looked like Jesus. Apparently that sentiment also took off on Twitter and was picked up by the website Buzzfeed too. I guess if the only requirements for looking like Jesus are long hair and a beard then there's a lot of guys who look like Jesus.

I want to look like Jesus, but I'm not talking beards and hair. I want to look like Jesus in the way I live and love. I want to look like Jesus to my family, friends and co-workers. I want to look like Jesus when others are looking at me and when I am alone. I want to look like Jesus in all that I do, say, think, and act. 

Really looking like Jesus is a lot harder that growing my hair out and not shaving. Looking like Jesus means not looking like me. It means dying to myself, my wants and desires. It takes grace.

Jesus give me grace to look like you.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Being and Doing

By Tom Ponchak
Image
"Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her." (Luke 10:42, from the Gospel for the 16th Sunday of Ordinary Time) I was listening to a podcast with Fr. John Riccardo and he said something to the effect of “we often think that the calling to be a disciple is to work for Jesus, but the calling of a disciple is to be with Jesus.” The Gospel account of Martha and Mary this week is so important for us to hear and learn from.  Over the last six years, I have worked in two suburban parishes doing adult formation. Both parishes are located in very affluent areas and have a large number of upper middle class, white collar professionals. We have CEOs, attorneys, physicians, salespeople, pharmaceutical professionals, corporate executives, and even professional athletes. I’ve joked at times that our home could probably fit in the garages of some of the parishioners I kn
Read more

Cultural Insanity and The Christian

By Tom Ponchak
Image
On multiple occasions over the past year I’ve had a reoccurring dream. I find myself in an insane asylum where the inmates have taken over and have the appearance of zombies. I was going from room to room looking for other trapped people, some asleep and others unaware of what was happening, and leading them to escape. At the same time, I encounter a few of the insane zombies and I am able to cure them so they become “normal” and leave with us. I believe this is a prophetic dream speaking to the nature of our culture and our mission as Christians. In the early telling of the story of Narcissus in Greek mythology the young man become enamored with his own image and committed suicide after despairing that no one could love him as much as he loved himself. It’s from this story that modern psychology takes the name Narcissistic Personality Disorder to describe an individual with an inflated sense of their own purpose and a lack of empathy for others. The Mayo Clinic lists the followin
Read more

Living in the Right-side Up

By Tom Ponchak
Image
“Christ Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things were created through him and for him.” Colossians 1:15-16 (Second Reading from 15 th Sunday of Ordinary Time – July 10, 2022) I must confess that I love Stranger Things, the streaming series on Netflex*. If you’re not familiar with Stranger Things, it’s a sci-fi/horror show set in a fictional Indiana town in the mid-80’s where our core group of characters battle evil forces from the Upside Down, another dimension that is a corrupted copy of their own world. I love how they’ve nailed the whole 1980’s vibe from the music to the clothes to the freedom we had as kids to roam the town with little parental supervision. The storylines are suspenseful, and you get attached to the characters. The primary hero figure is Eleven, a girl with telekinetic superp
Read more