Talk about a "full plate" of life! That is a most extreme understatement for my home and family right now! Honestly, there is so much going on, I'm not sure I even know what to write about next, yet I really want to write about it all. In fact, I must write about it all if this blog means a damn thing. These things are that important. Just not tonight!
It's midnight in Chicago, the rest of the family has passed out in our hotel room, and I'm only typing aimlessly because I feel too exhausted to sleep. However, too tired to sleep does not mean awake enough to do justice with the keyboard on all of the goings-on of this past week. The reason we're 300 miles from home tonight is just one of them.
The fact is, I (we) are being tested right now. And no, I don't credit God with that. He doesn't set these things up that way in my belief. It is the temporal life that we live here on earth, which on rare occasion, lines up a "perfect storm" of change. And that is what is pummelling the family right now.
What God does do, is give us the opportunity to face these things. He gives us the opportunity to react to them. And finally, he gives us the opportunity to better ourselves by them. That is the real test. To enter the storm, and not just come out, but come out stronger and improved somehow. Unfortunately, there are usually no charts to safe port when these things hit. We can only count on what's been built and fortified inside us to guide us through. An internal compass, to which we can pray to the Holy Spirit to point the true direction. God will give us that, but it's still up to us to use it.
We've scouted what appears to be a nice little Church close by that is of our particular denomination. Tomorrow's Sunday, and I think we'll go to Mass in the morning. I will pray for God's spirit to be with my family and me, and you know what? I'll bet that I'm ready to write part two of this blog tomorrow night. That we'll already be starting in the right direction through this storm.
That's what I call Faith.
1 comment:
Joel wrote: "That is the real test. To enter the storm, and not just come out, but come out stronger and improved somehow. Unfortunately, there are usually no charts to safe port when these things hit."
As I read the above quote in the post for this day, I was remindd of a line or two I used in a lay sermon to a previous parish to which we belonged:
A ship is safe in port.
But a ship was not made to stay in port.
I like the ship/storm analogy. It fits.
Life is very much like a journey on the ocean, one day calm; the next less so; and the next just the opposite. And one has to carry on.
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