6th Sunday A 15 February 2026 Choices
From Sirach - you have a choice fire or water. One will burn, one will refresh. Which will you take? (Sirach 15,16) One will do you good; one will do you harm, which shall it be?
Adam and Eve had a similar choice. They could eat from any tree in the garden, except that one. That should have been easy to decide, but we know we do not always want the most appropriate thing. So it has ever been since with the human family. How to make the right decision?
It is all part of the ongoing battle between good and evil. Good is the right way of looking at a question; evil the wrong.
Many would say that it is impossible to choose the good every time. It can be hard certainly, but never impossible with God's grace assisting.
We choose water over fire, right over wrong. If we do this in small everyday things it will strengthen us for big decisions when they come.
We become more accurate in our decisions, complying more often with what God Himself would decide.
Some things are easy to decide. The evil in these cases does not appeal to us. For example we are not going to burn down the town hall, or steal the crown jewels.
We will always choose rightly in such cases.
But when it comes to something I want to do, like talk unkindly of my neighbour, or tell lies to gain some kind of advantage, or perform an action I would rather avoid - then I have to work on my response.
As with any difficult thing we face, we can get better with practice. So we ‘practise’ our faith in doing or refraining from whatever is required.
As we do this the probability of getting it right will increase.
We eventually reach the point where we prefer the right action to the wrong one., so it is no big deal.
As this right-choosing increases we come more and more into the light of Christ.
We are coming to see things the way God sees them.
When He says , Come follow Me it means follow Him in the way that He thinks, He desires, He decides.
The Church proclaims this to the world. We point out the right choice. Fire or water, happiness or misery.
We are not just trying to stop everyone have a good time. We are offering the word of life.
Some human desires can be very entrenched, turning into addictions, compulsions, bad habits. They might need more work. With the Lenten season approaching we resolve to work on these deeper faults. We will come to prefer the good.
We call on Our Lady, who never committed a single sin, because she always saw the will of God as preferable to anything else.
We seek from God all the wisdom that He can grant to us.
This will give us a foretaste of Heaven. The reason Adam and Eve chose the forbidden fruit is that it was that it looked good to eat. Heaven will contain a lot more than one tree, and more beautiful than anything we have seen so far.
In the second reading we heard that the Holy Spirit reveals the depths of everything, even the depths of God (1 Co 2,10).
These are deep waters, and we need help to get all this right, and that help is available.
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