Rosary Month is now officially Respect Life Month, while still observing Respect Life Sunday (6). Fair Trade USA asks us to support lives in the developing markets in October as well.

Patience, self-control, and steadfast love are the themes of today’s readings.

The apostles ask Jesus for a favor that seems pious and fitting. Jesus has been exhorting them with teachings about what is expected of disciples—the renunciation of material wealth, unconditional forgiveness, mindfulness of the poor—and we can imagine these demands weigh heavily on those still quite attached to the world and its value system.

The apostles came up and said to the Master, “Give us more faith.”

Every year I would donate a homemade eight-course Italian dinner for six people for the school auction. Preparation took all day. I cooked everything from the appetizers to the dessert.

Have you ever experienced the disorientation of a fun house hall of mirrors? I remember going to Riverview, the great old amusement park in Chicago, when I was a kid and getting lost in Aladdin’s Castle. It was a dark, seemingly endless maze of trap doors and tilting floors and a hall of mirrors that reflected distorted images.

A sticky note sat on top of a pile of work with the words, “Couldn’t get to it, could you?” scratched on it. The missive writer was an assistant to the manager. The missive reader was the manager who came in Monday morning expecting his employee to have completed a specified list of tasks before the young assistant went on vacation.

In recent years celebrity poker games from Las Vegas have become popular on TV. The famous and well-to-do gamble with somebody else’s money. The winner has a big donation made in their name to a charity of their choosing. You be the judge of the morality of all this.

With faith in God's promises, we ask forgiveness for those times we have not let those promises be fulfilled in us.

Only the heart knows how to find what is precious.