Fr. Mike Schmitz

Paul's second letter to Timothy.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for these last days of this 365-day journey.

We give you, we can't even begin, Lord God, to count up the blessings, not only the blessings of beginning, the blessings of making it through to the end.

We have talked so many times, Lord, about having a good beginning.

you remind us that it is better to have a good ending than it is to have a good beginning help us to end well we make this our prayer in the name of jesus christ our lord amen in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit amen i want to go in reverse i want to talk first about the second letter of saint paul to timothy a couple things are just they're just beautiful you know as paul is encouraging his spiritual son timothy

one of the things that he's reminding him of doing is, is he's reminding him of the fact that suffering is going to be part of this, that there are those who are going to oppose you.

And there are those who are going to fall away.

I mean, we already, he already wrote to Timothy about this and he's just reminding him of this.

In fact, you know, even just those, those hard words, those sad words at the end of chapter four or middle of chapter four, really where St.

Paul says, do your best to come to me soon.

He's just, you can hear the ache in his voice.

For Demas, in love with this present world, has deserted me, gone to Thessalonica.

Crescens has gone to Galatia.

Titus to Damasia.

Luke alone is with me.

And get Mark and bring him with you.

He's very useful.

He goes on to say, Alexander the coppersmith did me great harm.

And at last, in verse 16, chapter 4, at my first defense, no one took my part.