THE readings on the Third Sunday of Lent remind us that we are meant for eternal life. In the first reading, from the Book of Ezekiel 37,12-14, we see how God promises to raise his people from their graves and fill them with his Spirit.
The Responsorial Psalm (130) practically asks us to trust in God’s mercy always, considering that we cannot avoid falling into sin. The Second Reading, from Romans 8,8-11, tells us that it is the Spirit of God that will give us true eternal life to our mortal bodies. The Gospel Acclamation, from Jn 11,25-26, reminds us that it is Christ who is the resurrection and the life, and if we believe in him, we actually will never die.
And the Gospel, from John 11,20-45, talks about the raising of Lazarus from the dead. It clearly shows that Christ has power over death.
With all these truths of our Christian faith, what we have to do is to correspond to them as best that we can. And it can only mean that we should try our best to be eternity-ready all the time.
We should therefore be clear about this point. Our time here on earth is a time of transit toward eternity, from where we came and to where we are heading. That’s because we are creatures of God who is in eternity. We came from him, and since we have been made in his image and likeness, we are meant to be with him in all eternity.
Our definitive state of life is to be with God in eternity. We therefore need to be eternity-ready in our time here on earth. And we can approximate that state of life and prepare ourselves for it by trying to be with God always, following his will and ways as we go through the drama of our earthly life.
We should know how to flow with the times without getting lost along the way. While there are changing things as we flow with the times, we also have to know that there are things that are not supposed to change, that will always have permanent value and relevance to us.
We need to see to it that our thoughts and desires are immersed in the supernatural gifts of faith, hope and charity, those theological virtues that enable our earthly and temporal affairs to acquire spiritual, supernatural and eternal value.
That is why, we need to study and assimilate the doctrine of our faith, make it generate hope in our earthly pilgrimage, and fuel the love that catapults us to eternity, uniting us to God and others.
This is how we can link our time here on earth with the eternity of our definitive life. It’s a matter of the belief that there is God and that he is our creator who gives us our very existence and that he continually, without any gap or break, intervenes in our life.
We have to be more aware of this truth, and more important, know how to deal with it. We often take it for granted, or worse, we can think that our life can just be on our own, completely dependent on what and how we make it to be.
Or we can think that we can be with God at some time and can be on our own at other times. We need to outgrow this mentality, because it simply does not correspond to reality. Ok, it’s not easy. There’s deep and vast awkwardness especially in the beginning. But it’s not a problem that cannot be solved.
When will they ever learn?
The morning Russia rolled its tanks across the border into Ukraine in February 2022, many analysts predicted Kyiv would fall in days. I remember reading those confident forecasts and thinking how quickly great powers convince themselves that smaller nations are soft targets. History, however, has a stubborn way of humiliating such arrogance.
Three years later, the war has not produced the swift triumph Moscow imagined. Instead, the invasion hardened Ukrainian resistance and rallied international support around a country that many outsiders once dismissed as fragile. A smaller nation, when pushed against the wall, often discovers reserves of courage that no intelligence report can measure. Tanks, missiles, and spreadsheets of military capability rarely capture something as unruly as national will.
I have noticed that powerful states repeat this mistake with almost ritual regularity. They look at maps, budgets, and troop counts, then conclude that victory will follow the arithmetic. Yet war refuses to behave like arithmetic. People defend their homes with a ferocity that seldom appears in military briefings.
Consider the uneasy tension between the United States and Iran. Policymakers and commentators sometimes speak as if a conflict there would be quick and decisive, as though geography, history, and nationalism could simply be brushed aside. But Iran is not a helpless pawn on the chessboard of global power. It is a country with a long memory, rugged terrain, and a population deeply sensitive to foreign intervention—factors that have humbled more than one ambitious empire.
I often think about how leaders, surrounded by strategy papers and glowing screens, can lose sight of the human element. War plans assume predictability; people rarely cooperate with such assumptions. A farmer defending his town, a teacher guarding her children, a mechanic picking up a rifle—these figures do not appear in neat columns of military data, yet they have a habit of reshaping wars.
There is also the quiet strength of national pride. Smaller nations often carry centuries of survival stories—stories whispered in kitchens, taught in classrooms, and sung in old songs. When an outsider threatens that shared memory, resistance becomes more than military duty; it becomes a matter of dignity. And dignity, unlike ammunition, does not easily run out.
That is why I sometimes hear an old line from the folk song Where Have All the Flowers Gone by Pete Seeger echoing in my head: “When will they ever learn?” The question hangs in the air every time a powerful nation assumes that strength alone guarantees victory. Time and again, the battlefield answers with a patient, bruising correction.
Power should travel with humility. Before marching armies or launching missiles, leaders might do well to remember that even the smallest nation contains millions of stubborn hearts. And those hearts, when stirred by invasion or threat, can turn the grand calculations of superpowers into long, costly lessons.