Thursday, April 25, 2024
Feast of Saint Mark, evangelist
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
My boys and my God
Jim Finley points out that our relationship with God is a thread, not a rope. It breaks easily on our end, but never breaks on God’s end. God’s faithfulness to us is what we can have faith in, when we need God to be “our God,” when we feel adrift in the universe, in the dark, with no idea where to turn.
When our daughter Andi started school she walked with her brothers, Chris and Marc, who were a few years older. Sometimes she also walked with our dog, Bear, when Margaret or I could go with them and bring Bear home. After school when we could pick her up in person, we brought Bear along too, and many of her classmates learned to love Andi’s black lab.
She loved being surrounded by her family, and she called her brothers “my boys.” Emphasizing the word “MY.” And now, grown-up wife and mom, she calls her own sons, “my boys.” And she calls her God, “my God.”
Over the years her relationship with God allows her confidence to give herself in unique ways to her friends, as well as her family. She not only teaches art, but she models to her students and fellow teachers what it means to be comfortable with God, and praying with God. Ron Rolheiser says about himself, (and about Andi by the way):
(She) has come to realize that being with God in prayer and being with God in heart is like being with a trusted friend. In an easeful friendship, friends don’t spend most of their time talking about their mutual friendship. Rather they talk about everything: local gossip, the weather, their work, their children, their headaches, their heartaches, their tiredness, what they saw on television the night before, their favorite sports teams, what’s happening in politics, and the jokes they’ve heard recently – though they occasionally lament that they should ideally be talking more about deeper things. But should they?
In a month we’ll be going to the Texas Gulf coast for a few days, building sand castles and looking for shells on the beach at Port Aransas. Much of our family (including Aki’s parents) will be together. We’ll share meals and games and hours on the beach, and we’ll also share our prayers. We look forward to praying with Andi. The years have been good to us. God is so near. Rolheiser continues:
John of the Cross teaches that, in any longer-term friendship, eventually the important things begin to happen under the surface, and surface conversation becomes secondary. Togetherness, ease with each other, comfort, and the sense of being at home, is what we give each other then.
That’s also true for our relationship with God. God made us to be human and God wants us, with all of our wandering weaknesses, to be in his presence, with ease, with comfort, and with the feeling that we are at home.
It’s good to sing of the goodness of the Lord.
Blessed the people who know the joyful shout; in the light of your countenance, O LORD, they walk. At your name they rejoice all the day, and through your justice they are exalted.
(1 Peter 5, Psalm 89, 1 Corinthians 1, Mark 16)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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