July 20, 2026 // Monday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time // Optional Memorial of Saint Apollinaris, Bishop and Martyr

Read the Word // Open your Bible to today’s First Reading: Micah 6:1-4, 6-8

Reflect on the Word // 

I sat at the kitchen table staring absently out the window, my thoughts a million miles away. I was healing and reorienting after a major personal decision, and many negative emotions now competed with good memories from the past year. My thoughts harshly accused me as I assessed my mistakes and wondered how I could “make it up” to God for falling short. At that moment, my eyes drifted to the Divine Mercy image on our kitchen wall. Christ’s face pleaded that I didn’t need to do this. Trust and humility would suffice. 

Today’s First Reading takes us into the hills where the Lord and Israel hold trial. I imagine myself standing in the mountains where this exchange reverberates from the rocks and high places. Since the Lord uses many words like “hear,” “pay attention,” and “answer me,” I know I must listen carefully. Then, the divine vulnerability of God’s petition cuts me to the heart: “O my people, what have I done to you, or how have I wearied you? Answer me!” (Micah 6:3) Although He is God, He only accuses us humbly. 

Do I perceive Christ’s mercy? I often anticipate an exacting God only to find Him more lenient than I am towards myself. I am sometimes like Israel, trying to offer holocausts and streams of oil: I also try to calculate how to placate God, certain that I must do something big. 

But the Lord shows me I am thinking in human terms. Have I listened to what He requires? His tenderness convicts, then shows me the true solution, simple and insignificant though it may seem: “to do the right and to love goodness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). His divine, merciful gaze entreats me to let this truth echo in my memory. 

Sister, release your thoughts and self-accusation to Him. God does not upbraid you or measure the way we do, even in the hilly, hard places of life. He does not condemn: He calls out tenderly, mercifully, and humbly. He shows us how to act. Trust that He knows what suffices. 

Relate to the Lord // Today, meditate on an image of the Divine Mercy.