November 19, 2025 // Wednesday of the Thirty-third Week in Ordinary Time
Read the Word // Open your Bible to today’s First Reading: 2 Maccabees 7:1, 20-31
Reflect on the Word //
When I was fourteen, my baby brother was born with two heart murmurs, which, in time, closed up. “Holes in his heart,” the doctors called them. Listening to his heartbeat, they would hear the rushing noises, murmurs caused by what is known as a “turbulent” flow of blood across the heart.
This year, I have often prayed with this image. Exteriorly, I have been saying goodbye to college, moving cross-country, planning for the future. Interiorly, my heart has been murmuring—worrying, savoring, mourning, dreaming. The undercurrent of turbulence calls to my mind the quote from Saint Augustine’s Confessions: “My heart is restless until I rest in Thee.”
In today’s First Reading, when I ponder the king’s offer to the youngest of the woman’s sons, I feel as though I am reading a list of things that would fill some of these holes in my heart: “The king appealed to him, not with mere words, but with promises on oath, to make him rich and happy if he would abandon his ancestral customs: he would make him his friend and entrust him with high office” (2 Maccabees 7:24).
Surely this youngest son had his own hopes and dreams for his life, still just beginning. Surely he had many good and holy desires: longings for abundance, happiness, companionship, trust. Here, as an alternative to death, he is promised their fulfillment.
Yet “the youth paid no attention to him at all” (2 Maccabees 7:25). Perhaps he was still pondering his mother’s earlier words. Perhaps he had even been able to predict them, if from his babyhood he had known the strength of her faith. She had just reminded her sons that God alone is the giver of good things, concluding: “He, in his mercy, will give you back both breath and life” (2 Maccabees 7:23).
This confidence can be ours too. Like the mother in Maccabees, we can trust God to be generous. Our hearts are right to cry out for perfect happiness—for the day will come when the Lord will give all good things, no longer for a time but for eternity, and how glorious that day will be!
Relate to the Lord // Has your heart been turbulent? Meditate on the generosity of God today. Trust in His love for you.
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