A Call to Leadership

Today's rain clouds did have a silver lining. I was able to pick up Faith FM 94.3 on the drive home. They played this new song called Lead Me. Actually it's not that new apparently it's been #1 on the Christian music charts for a few weeks but I just heard it today.



The song is a powerful reminder to men that we have to take a leadership role in our families and leadership means self sacrifice. The song also inspired the band Sanctus Real to post a special prayer on their website, which the announcer read on air today:

Lead Me- a prayer for husbands

Christ Jesus, you have called me to love my wife tenderly and sacrificially, even as you love the church, but too often I know myself to be a selfish man with a distracted heart. Please give me patience, gentleness, and kindness toward my wife, and the wisdom to value her for her gifts and ideas. Teach me to be vulnerable with her, openly sharing my own heart and thoughts, hopes and fears, even as I seek to better understand her.

Remind me to be ever mindful of her interests and needs with each decision I make and to structure my life in such a way that she receives the best of my energy and attention, rather than the leftovers. Give me courage to passionately pursue relationship with her even when I feel wronged or wounded. Let me become for her a man of tenderness, kindness, creativity, and integrity, protecting and cherishing her by vigilantly guarding my own eyes and heart.

Above all, teach me to lead as you led, Jesus, in humility and service. Only by your grace can I be a godly man and a good husband for my wife.

Lead me Lord, I pray.

As a rather remarkable coincidence today's readings at Mass included Ephesians 5:21-33:

Brothers and sisters:

Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord.For the husband is head of his wife just as Christ is head of the Church,he himself the savior of the Body. As the Church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the Church and handed himself over for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word, that he might present to himself the Church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.

So also husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the Church, because we are members of his Body.

For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the Church.

In any case, each one of you should love his wife as himself, and the wife should respect her husband.

Maybe God's trying to tell me something.