Welcome to our daily rosary meditation. These meditations were recorded just this past June in the Holy Land.

And one of my favorite things in the world is to lead people to a deep encounter with Jesus and Mary in Bethlehem,

at the home of the Holy Family in Nazareth, on the Sea of Galilee, in the

Garden of Gisemone, and in the empty tomb of Jesus in Jerusalem.

And I want to invite you to this same encounter this December,

2003, for the best Christmas preparation ever.

Just go to schoolof faith.com,

click on pilgrimages, and you can get all the information.

So let's begin in the name of the Father and the Son and the

Holy Spirit. Amen. And let's call to mind all those we've promised to pray for. Today we are sitting

right on the bank of the Jordan River where Jesus was baptized.

Now the difficulty with living in the first world is that we think we have everything we need.

And we think therefore we don't need God. And if you think you don't need God, then you probably aren't working on a friendship with him. This is pride. Pride makes us think

we are masters of our universe. We have everything under control. But we were made to share in the

life of God. Yet pride caused us to turn away from God, and we broke the relationship, and we became

enslaved to sin.

We became enslaved to self-destructive tendencies and to death.

That happened right away at the beginning of humanity.

So have you ever wondered why God waited so long to send the

Savior? Well, because in our pride, we thought we could save ourselves, and we were not ready to accept

his saving help. So God had to wait until we were not ready to accept his saving help. So God had to wait until we realized our lives had become unmanageable

and that we were powerless to save ourselves.

...