“Not now. Too busy. I’m tired. Tomorrow.” These are the words we say when we don’t want to respond to God’s call. We hop on a boat and hope God doesn’t follow.
God doesn’t mind waiting, but He gives us opportunities, loads of opportunities to respond to His invitation. So yesterday, I found myself at our local Catholic church, waiting for confession. While sitting, I ran into two friends.
My own concerns involved my recent struggle with prayer life, the absence of which, was substituted with anxiety –the correlation between the absence and the unwanted presence seemed obvious. I needed to pray, to let go of the cares and woes of the world. The readings of the day fit with my feelings exactly. We are enslaved to sin, to buildings of this world, and only freed by Christ’s intercession and generosity.
I needed to stop delaying. God wanted me. He wanted my heart here and now, undistracted by all the things I put in front. Confession led to staying for the mass, led to listening to a podcast as I drove, but the anxiety, the stress fell away. Theoretically, I had less time. After all, I’d spent two hours where I intended to spend fifteen minutes, but it made the rest of the day a day of rest despite itself.
Grace works to make the ordinary something other than anxious. It doesn’t take away suffering or eliminate trials, it allows us to weather them, to live through them in a way that would otherwise be unimaginable. I look back at 2021 and chemo and losing my hair and remember the fatigue, the medication, all of it. But walking through the memories of those months feels like a fog.
I know I lived through it, but just moments stay. The flood of cards a friend organized. Getting my hair shaved after it started falling out everywhere. Going to the Aquino clinic, sitting in the recliners and being given warm heated sheets while they hooked up the red devil medicine. I’d pray the rosary and go through my prayer book and collapse into sleep, only to be awakened and told, it was time to go home.
Those days, I felt like I slept most the day. My recall of the year mostly centers around changes in treatment, milestones like finishing chemo or radiation. But I also know, God gave me grace to walk through those months.
This year, I feel like I’m racing through everything –days, weeks, months, the hours of work, the hours of errands. So I came to that mass, to that confession, to help myself rediscover to slow down, to experience each day, each moment as it came.
Be present, be loving, be kind. The world survives only if we decide to respond to hate with love, cruelty with kindness, and to the illegal and immoral with justice and charity. It sounds crazy, but it is the only way we stop the world from becoming more and more scarred by sin. Be kind because the world depends upon it.
It’s why we can’t delay anymore or deny God, we must run to Him, embrace Him, and bring Him to everyone.
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