Lord My Chef Daily Recipe for the Soul by Fr. Nicanor F. Lalog II
Thursday, Second Week in Ordinary Time, Year II, 22 January 2026
1 Samuel 18:6-9; 19:1-7 <*{{{{>< + ><}}}}*> Mark 3:7-12
Your words today,
O Lord, are very disturbing,
even baffling but very revealing:
in the first reading we heard
the beginning of Saul's jealousy
of David while in the gospel
of how "unclean spirits" recognized
Jesus as the Son of God.
Lord, give us the courage
to confront every jealousy
that seeps into us,
from the most simple ones
to more greater ones that really
get us destabilized like that of Saul
when he heard people praised David
for killing ten thousand
compared to his thousands;
jealousy can be a terrible thing
because it is difficult to see others
better than us; most of all,
most difficult of all is to see people
turning away their attention from us
for others.
Saul was very angry and resentful of the song… And from that day on, Saul was jealous of David (1 Samuel 18:8, 9).
Teach us Jesus
to accept fully our strengths
and weaknesses,
to not measure our success
as persons by what we can do
or what others say; teach us to
imitate St. John the Baptist who
declared "Christ must increase,
but I must decrease" (John 3:30).
Teach us, Lord Jesus
to be honest and sincere
like you, so contented in yourself:
you silenced the unclean spirits
from making you known;
how intriguing that so often,
it is our dark, sinful side
where we truly find the hard truths
of life; if we could just be like you,
we would never be taken over
by jealousy because the moment
we experience jealousy,
then we realize the truth
of somebody better than us
in some aspects; jealousy is an
unclean spirit within us that
speak of the truth not to set us
free but to enslave us by driving us
into the opposite direction of self-
aggrandizement.
Teach us, Jesus,
that all that matters
is for us to give glory to God
and that the work of your
Kingdom is always done,
by us and by others.
Amen.
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