I had a beautiful piece about how important each of us is to the whole universe, and most especially to the creator of the universe. The piece had pictures and I hit publish and the internet vaporized my work. Now, trying to rewrite the piece, I find the threads are hard to grasp, though I know the fundamental reality I wanted to share.
We are created in God’s image, male and female. God imagined us into being, and each of us has an eternal destiny. Sainthood is the objective for every soul and our God is a jealous God, not interested in losing any soul. So He waits, He showers us with gifts and graces, opportunities and miracles, beauty and more. His gifts always point to the more, the infinite destiny to which we are called, but must freely accept and seek.
What keeps us from this great future and present is our own failure to live a life of sacrifice. We do not seek sainthood, nor do we seek to dive deeper into relationship with God. The extent to which we ignore these opportunities and do not seek to go through through the narrow gate, is what will lead us to purgatory or worse. When we refuse God’s mercy for others and ourselves, we leave God with little room to maneuver. He must respect our freedom even if we’re stupid and wasteful with His gifts. Nothing can take away one’s freewill to love or not, to seek God or not. What remains, is that we must as God must, accept the consequences of our use or abuse of freedom, and of our love or lack thereof of our neighbors.
God longs to hold us. He loves us. He wants us to come home. However, He respects our free will and infinite dignity.
Our infinite dignity means we have an infinite reality before us, and the resurrection assures us that death is not the end. God does not renege on any of his gifts, not freewill and not love, and not the infinite nature of our souls. As such, the infinite dignity is a forever from conception to forever, regardless of age, capacity, honed talents, power, position, degrees, awards, honors, relationships, sins, or failures. Nothing takes away from that innate dignity, it is a given.
The unborn hold innate dignity.
The immigrant holds innate dignity.
Those we consider enemies, hold innate dignity.
Those we consider hostile to all we hold dear, hold innate dignity.
The convicted hold innate dignity.
The addicted hold innate dignity.
The dying hold innate dignity.
The long suffering hold innate dignity.
Homeless hold innate dignity.
Mentally ill hold innate dignity.
People who hold values we find abhorrent still hold innate dignity.
Individuals who engage in sinful behaviors still hold innate dignity.
Nothing, again, nothing, removes this gift God bestowed upon us from the moment of our being imagined into being. So now we have before us, the rest of our lives, and all the people we love, to love and to remind with all we do, how beautiful, how wonderful, how important each of us is to God and to the world.
It still isn’t what I wrote before, but it conveys the fundamental issue I wanted to address.
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