May 21, 2026 // Thursday of the Seventh Week of Easter // Optional Memorial of Saint Christopher Magallanes, Priest, and Companions, Martyrs

Read the Word // Open your Bible to today’s Gospel: John 17:20-36

Reflect on the Word //

When I think of the most memorable moments where I have heard God’s voice speaking directly to me, it was when I was alone in prayer, probably on a random weekday. No momentous occasion or harrowing event, no dramatic conversion experience, just simple words spoken specifically to me with the intimacy and love only Jesus can give.

When I let the words of Jesus’ prayer from today’s Gospel wash over me, I am astounded by how beautifully He expresses His love for me. It truly is amazing that the God Who created a fully functioning and ordered universe from star nebulae to the intricacies of particles would become human and feel and express such love for me. My impulse is to wish that I could respond in a more fabulous fashion. What have I to give? How do I respond when my life is so ordinary?

But through Jesus’ very words, “Father, they are a gift to me, I wish that where I am they also may be with me” (John 17:24), comes the answer I am looking for in how to respond to such immense love: to simply be with Jesus. To desire to be with the Lord and to love Him in return is all that I need to do. I can’t create with powerful gestures or perform miracles to show God that I love Him. But I can live in the truth that I was created as a gift, a gift by and for the Lord. I have been created by the Father, and given as a gift to the Son through love! 

We can spend our whole lives discovering and understanding what it means to be one with the Lord through the gift of our existence. We may uncover it slowly day by day, through the very small and the very ordinary. Because it is not through grand gestures that we become one with the Lord, but through simply loving Him.

Relate to the Lord // What would it look like to simply be with Jesus today?