Good thoughts from a good teacher–a good Director of Religious Education–that our parish would surely wish to keep!
Jesus loves us. And he loves us not with a gooshy feel good love, but with a love that summons us to be the best that we can be: to be perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect. This love can feel great at times, and other times, we want to say, “No thanks, I prefer option B.” In the past 5 years, his love for me has involved my husband’s kidney transplant, my son’s autism diagnosis, my hysterectomy, moving 3 times in 3 years, becoming an advocate for special needs, teaching full time, teaching not at all, becoming a parish office worker, and leaving again after I fell in love with parish work. God’s love is hard. And please don’t tell me about “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle,” because I can’t handle all of this, and I don’t handle all of it well.
(source: Truckin’ for the Lord)
From the other side of things, it’s hard to agree that she and her family “don’t handle all of it well,” but I know I wouldn’t like to borrow that list of challenges. I don’t handle my own problems well, and not many of my problems would be worth mentioning in this company!
But every one of us, however ragged or smooth, do struggle; and we do find love in this struggle. And it is in this struggle to be what God made us–that is, what the Creator intended and what our Redeemer not only heals but perfects–that we have a real chance for real and lasting love, for a durable thickness of relationships with God and other people that make us able to give what we didn’t know we have because we have received more than we can account for, even when it hurts.
Even when it hurts! It hurts!
We can’t take that away from each other without stealing each other’s hope. We have to help where there is injustice, where evil is oppressing and distressing those who are not able to bear it without our help, and it is enough to keep our lives busy doing even the least bit of good in this way. We cannot steal the pain from being fallen, cannot help each other keep up walls of denial, without destroying each other.
We have to speak truth, inviting the whole world through the door without destroying the walls and windows by which the precinct of life, the living interior of the Ark, can be seen, shown, entered, embraced, and tasted.
That thing about the deer? The one that pants for the running streams?
It doesn’t pant because it’s standing in a pond, folks.
…
About the proximate point of her post, which set me looking for a good quotation to reflect on, I agree with everything. I have one sentence I would like to chew over, though, and possibly refine–but that would only be possible if we were discussing a case in point. But I almost hate to “zoom in” to that point away from the sheer, emphatic hardness and goodness of God–a reality we cannot help coming to grips with, eventually, unless we choose to push Him away altogether. May we know the loving embrace of a hard, terrible God whose wounds heal our hurtfulness–and even, in time, our hurts.