It was a week that started off with a lot of stuff going wrong. Off the bat on Monday morning, poured my coffee after Mass, settled into reading my emails, looking at the agenda of the week, feeling pretty good about myself….then….spilled my cup of coffee on the laptop. Big sad face. Called myself a stupid idiot under my breath and then the process begins of trying to put everything in order and asking myself what to do next and how to recreate and gather the week together without the one tool that helps you to organize and do all the work you are used to doing???? I guess I could blame it all on Donald Trump but that may be stretching it a bit far…I must take responsibility for this myself.
One of the normal human joys and failings is that we are always looking for someone to solve our problems at the same time we are looking for someone to blame our problems on…and believe it or not they often turn out to be the same person. In faith we often do, and rightly so, look to God for the solution to our problems and at the same time, and wrongly so, blame God for all the problems in our life and in the world. It is that small and necessary understanding that we “look to God for solutions to” rather than “we want God to solve” our problems that is the moment of growing in faith, hope and love in our life. For me it is the work of choosing to frame my life differently form the “What if I had…?” to the “What if I do…?
We can, and often do, spend considerable amount of time, energy and treasure on the, “what if I had?” questions of life. In my journey of vocation the biggest question that came up over and over again was the “What if I had recognized and answered God’s call to the priesthood in my twenties?” It is an impossible question to answer as my spiritual director continually reminded me during my formation. I could blame all sorts of people, myself and certainly God for not making it clearer what He wanted me to do in life and yet all of that was empty thought because it didn’t happen. The bigger question wasn’t about God solving the question it was the seeking of God’s presence and how that presence brought me to the ultimate “yes” in my life.
In the daily examen it is a question that we must all be answered each day anew. In reviewing the day and seeking God’s presence in the good things and the bad, in the moments when I acted as a blessing and those when I chose not to act as blessing, and how God through the people around me helps me to grow in love throughout the day was the movement from the looking at the world in regret and defeat and choosing to seek out the hopefulness of joyful faith where the new day begins “What if I do…?’ and “How can I grow in…?”
When we choose the possibilities of hope, we then move from the doom and gloom of a coffee covered computer to the reality that while it is a wonderful tool of ministry and life that can and will be replaced, what cannot be replaced is the person with whom I speak each morning, noon and night, Jesus Christ, and how he is made present in my daily life with and through others is the greatest and true blessing that I can and should celebrate each day.
It is a lesson learned and relearned each time I choose to act in truth.
God Bless,
Fr. Mark