To truly serve God's purpose, ministry has to take a very distinct second place to our families, the very people who most challenge our weak-kneed virtues, the very ones who intimately know our faults, who suffer daily from our sins, but who love us in their broken human fashion even when all the rest of the world gives us the cold shoulder. These are the ones we are charged to help into heaven. These are the ones charged with helping us.
If my public ministries are to bear fruit, I must tend my little family garden at home with the utmost dedication and humility. For it is in our families more than anywhere else that we find the face of Jesus Christ, vulnerable and unadorned. In the irritable spouse, the moody teenager, the querulous old parent, He asks us to forget success and embrace the sacrifice of Christ's pure love, again and again and again.
I'd like to share an excerpt from a wonderful little book of Lenten meditations, The Pain of Christ and the Sorrow of God, by Gerald Vann, OP, which says it all much better than I can:
Let us try then, during this Lent, to learn this lesson from our Lord's agony: the love of God's will, the sacrament of the present moment.
Next week, I'll go a little deeper into some thoughts on married life in, "Love Notes."
God bless you!
Lisa
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