Men Rise Up Challenge

“The family has the mission to guard, reveal and communicate love.” -St. John Paul II

I am in midst of The Men Rise Up Challenge and encourage all men to go to this website and partake. I will be glad to walk with you through it.

I was blessed with a father, who though although was a broken and imperfect vessel like me, loved me and taught me everything about life and shared his faith in God and Our Catholic faith with me as I try my best to do and pass on to my children and others.

I thank God, my Father in Heaven, for giving me my Pop.

Pop, I love you and miss you every day but I know you live in me and I am grateful for everything you have given me and most importantly loving your wife and my Mother and passing on the faith to me. Thank you for teaching me and helping me become the man God has created me to be even though I am still working on improving in this area. Please pray for me! Love, your son, Chasaroo!

What is written below is taken from the Men Rise Up Challenge-

I want to thank you Christopher Stefanick, Bill Donaghy and all the others men involved for bringing us this challenge.

Day 23: Men Rise Up Challenge –

Fatherhood is the watermark behind everything, and everyone. It was the Heavenly Father, after all, Who created the world, spoke the first Word and the universe unfurled like a beautiful canvas; and He is still creating new wonders every day. This is the Father’s love; it’s free, it’s fruitful, and totally unmerited! This is the plan that the Father is inviting man to share in. We are to take part in this greatest of projects; the building of a culture of life and a civilization of love. We are invited through our fatherhood (physical and spiritual) to bring the very life of God into the visible world!

From the beginning there has been an enemy of this project of the human family. He attacked it from the very start in the Garden of Eden by first attacking the woman, who was to be “mother of all the living.” This was a veiled threat against our masculine call to make love present with the help of the woman, to bring life to the world, to protect her beauty, her femininity, her motherhood and this new life we both have to care for and cultivate.

In one of his final interviews, St. John Paul II reflected on this attack on man that has affected all of history. He said “Original sin attempts… to abolish fatherhood, destroying its rays which permeate the created world, placing in doubt the truth about God who is Love… ” (Crossing the Threshold of Hope, pg. 228)

The same call to fatherhood; to protect, to serve, to shepherd and to love remains for every man. Do we shrink from the call to this epic battle as Adam did? In an address to men in 2012, Pope Benedict XVI wrote “Man’s refusal to make any commitment… means that man remains closed in on himself and keeps his ‘I’ ultimately for himself, without really rising above it.” Do we dare to rise?

If we are to rediscover our identity, to know who we are, we must return and reclaim the story of our origins. Our Holy Fathers, with their own fatherly hearts, have clearly proclaimed this truth time and time again.

The family “is the basic cell of society. It is the cradle of life and love, the place in which the individual ‘is born’ and ‘grows.’” -St. John Paul II

“The family is the authentic setting in which to hand on the blueprint of human existence.” -Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI

“The dynamics of the relationship between God, man and woman, and their children, are the golden key to understand the world and history, with all that they contain…” -Pope Francis

Now more than ever, perhaps more profoundly than at any other time in the history of the human family, we men must rise. As sons we must reconnect with our fathers, as brothers we must band together, as husbands we must serve and lead in love, as fathers we must rise and take up the task of the family; this divine project that brings the very life of God into the world!

Challenge For All:

Think about your relationship with your father (or lack of one if this is your story). Write him a letter saying what you’re grateful for in him, and send it to him. Or, if he’s passed on, envision him with you and read it to him.

Make sure you don’t let today pass without telling every member of your household that you love them.