Our gospel today presents the figure of Saint John the Baptist and his mission: “Prepare the way of the Lord! Straighten up your paths!" John the Baptist is a man of conversion and penance. The best way to meet the Lord is the way of conversion through penance. However, sometimes, when we talk about penance, it seems that it has such a negative and heavy sense. In fact, penance is nothing more than purifying ourselves from the excess of vanities, of pride, of our behaviors and practices. It is pruning time. It is time to prune the areas of our lives that are unnecessary and unhealthy in order to be fruitful.

Sometimes, we often associate conversion to going to church, praying and by faithfully doing our piety practices. We need to understand that “practices” are not conversion. They are means but we need to turn them into true fruits of conversion. We need to change our way of speaking, of behaving, and relating to other people. How many times do we let ourselves sour and bitter with life, making things hard and painful with our words and attitudes towards our neighbors?

The first “thermometer” of our conversion is our family. How we relate to each other, how we are living with those closest to us, says a lot about our conversion. When we are called to penance, we are called to review our attitudes and gestures. We are called to rethink the way we conduct and our lives. John is for us an “arrow”. He points the way and indicates to us who the Savior is.

This advent season, let us learn from John, a man and voice of God who leads others to God through his words and actions. It is through our lives, our choices, our attitudes that a path for the Lord is created to reach out to others. May our lives, our choices, our attitudes and actions become real roads that Jesus goes through to reach people. Amen!