Grace in Ordinary Moments

God’s call often overtakes people not in sanctuaries but in the midst of errands, ledgers, and losses. Today’s readings unfold that pattern with surprising clarity. Saul stumbles into kingship while chasing lost animals. Levi the tax collector rises from a desk piled with compromises into discipleship at a single word. The psalm refuses the fantasy that strength originates in ourselves, insisting instead that the crown, the life, the joy, and the victory all come from God. And the Church marks the Memorial of Saint Anthony, Abbot, whose radical yes in the Egyptian desert reveals that holiness is not an escape from the world but a daring way of loving it through God.

Chosen in the Ordinary

Saul does not set out to be king; he sets out to find his father’s donkeys. Yet God had already set His sights on Saul: “This is the man... he is to govern my people.” The scene is a reminder that God’s initiative is primary. Vocation is not conjured by strategy; it is recognized in obedience.

There is, however, a warning woven into Saul’s story that will surface later: anointing is not the same as abiding. The oil on the head is real, but it calls for a converted heart. Many of life’s roles; parent, manager, teacher, civic worker, friend; carry an anointing of responsibility. The temptation is to confuse giftedness with holiness, visibility with fidelity, or height with depth. Today’s passage invites a quiet question: in the tasks I did not choose but have been given, am I allowing God to form me for the people He entrusts to me?

Modern life often feels like Saul’s wandering through regions without success: job searches that stall, caregiving that exhausts, projects that refuse to cohere. The unseen mercy here is that God makes use of detours. The hill country of frustration can become the place of encounter. Faith turns repetition into receptivity. Keep walking. The seer’s gate appears where we least expect it.

In God’s Strength, Not Our Own

The psalm puts the crown back in God’s hands: “O Lord, in your strength the king is glad.” Joy springs not from self-assertion but from received grace; “You placed on his head a crown of pure gold.” This runs against the currents of achievement culture, where metrics, likes, and outcomes subtly become altars. The result is anxiety dressed as diligence.

The psalm offers a different interior posture: desires laid open before God, victories interpreted as His gift, and glory translated into service. To pray like this reorders desire. It asks for life not merely in the sense of survival or extension, but as communion; “the joy of Your face.” When work feels like warfare, return to this psalm. Let it tune the heart to gratitude and relocate strength back in the Lord.

The Physician at Our Table

Jesus looks at Levi and says, “Follow me.” The Gospel does not pause to list Levi’s qualifications. It shows his availability. Then the scene shifts to a table crowded with the sorts of people from whom the pious kept distance. The scandal is not Jesus’ tolerance of sin but His refusal to be distant from sinners. “Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do.” Grace draws near before we are tidy.

A painful honesty belongs here: every community has its untouchables; the politically opposite, the chronically negative, the addicted, the undocumented, the formerly incarcerated, the unchurched relative whose life choices confound us, and also, quietly, ourselves. Shame keeps us plotting self-improvement as a precondition for proximity to Christ. Jesus overturns that math. He sits first; healing begins at the meal.

Two questions rise. First, where do I need to let the Divine Physician examine me without pretense? This is the grace of Reconciliation and the daily practice of truth-telling before God. Second, whom have I kept at the edge of my hospitality? Levi responds to mercy with a banquet. A disciple’s home becomes a clinic when the table is set for those mercy misses elsewhere.

Saint Anthony, Abbot: The Desert as Laboratory of Love

Anthony of Egypt (c. 251–356) heard the Gospel in church; “Go, sell what you have... then come, follow me”; and took it with radical seriousness. Distributing his inheritance to the poor, he sought God in the desert, not to despise the world but to be purified for its sake. There he learned spiritual warfare: the drama of thoughts, the slow schooling of the heart in humility, the steadying power of Scripture, the necessity of manual labor and almsgiving. Though he loved solitude, Anthony emerged from it when charity demanded; encouraging martyrs in Alexandria, counseling seekers who found him, and anchoring a movement that would become Christian monasticism.

Anthony’s legacy addresses the modern soul frayed by noise. The “desert” for many will not be dunes but disciplines: a phone laid aside, a quiet corner reclaimed, a fast that unclutters appetite, a simple budget that frees generosity, a schedule that honors prayer. The point is not austerity for its own sake but space for communion. The early monks spoke of logismoi; recurring thought-patterns that distort our loves. Today they surface as loops of comparison, resentment, lust, acedia, catastrophizing. Anthony teaches us to meet them with Scripture on the lips, the holy name in the heart, and practices that stabilize freedom. He shows that solitude and solidarity are allies: the one deepens love for God, the other extends it to neighbor.

Anointing and Table: Living the Sacramental Pattern

Samuel’s oil and Levi’s meal converge in the Church’s life. In Baptism and Confirmation, Christians are anointed; claimed and commissioned. In the Eucharist, sinners are gathered, examined, and fed. This is our pattern week after week: called in our ordinariness, strengthened not by our resolve but by the Lord’s strength, seated at a table where healing starts before perfection arrives, then sent back into the world to govern; whether a classroom, a kitchen, a crew, or a company; with mercy.

The measure of this life is not spectacle but fidelity: the willingness to let God’s choice overtake our plans, to let His strength replace our self-reliance, to let His table expand our hospitality, and to let the desert heal our attention.

Practices for the Coming Days

• Find God in an errand: choose one routine task and consciously offer it for someone by name. Ask for eyes to notice an unexpected summons there.
• Make room for the Physician: schedule Confession or set aside ten quiet minutes daily to tell God the unvarnished truth, then receive His mercy.
• Host a small mercy: share a meal or coffee with someone you have quietly kept at a distance. Listen more than you speak.
• Enter a simple desert: one tech-free hour a day, a modest fast, or a brief passage of Scripture repeated aloud to steady wandering thoughts.
• Pray Psalm 21 slowly, returning your “crowns” to God; your achievements, roles, and plans; so that joy can flow from His strength, not your strain.

God met Saul on a search, healed Levi at a table, and formed Anthony in silence. If grace found them there, it can find us here; on the commute, in the inbox, at the sink, in the ache we do not name. When He says, “Follow me,” the road ahead will not be effortless, but it will be true. And on that road, the oil will not run dry, the table will not be empty, and the desert will not be desolate, because God Himself goes with us.