If there is one foundational Scriptural text for our work in ACTS XXIX, this is it. ACTS XXIX doesn’t offer programs, though programs can be and often are immensely helpful in the Church. Instead, the charism, the gift, God has entrusted to us as an apostolate is what we call “the three essential principles” for transformation in the Church and in the world.

There are so many things I do not understand about this world that God has lovingly brought into existence. There are so many people for whom I am concerned. There are so many situations that seem to make no sense at all to me. There are so many things that happened to me in my life that I don’t understand, and yet I can see how God has used them to draw me to Himself.

None of us “deserved” God coming to our rescue, let alone in the most scandalous way of becoming man and going to the cross — an act that, while it looked like a humiliating defeat, turned out in the end to be a victory of genuinely cosmic proportions!

Saint Jerome famously wrote, “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.” What’s always been important to me about these words of Jerome is that they come in a commentary he wrote on the prophet Isaiah. In other words, Jerome is saying that ignorance of the Old Testament is ignorance of Christ! That’s more than a bit problematic for many of us.