From what is missing, better is born
God sometimes strips us painfully of the things and matters that seem essential to our lives.
We like to own. We are attached to our own property. It gives us a sense of security, of strengthening our position in this world. Money in the bank, car in the garage. Fashionable clothes in the wardrobe, large apartment, planned vacation. It seems to us that then and only then can we be happy. What we have constitute our value.
People often lose everything: War takes all property. Severe disease - strength, health. Unemployment - work, savings. And suddenly Man discovers that he is alive, breathing, loved and still able to love; his heart is still beating.
At the end of his earthly mission, Jesus was stripped of everything: friendship, dignity, the right to personal inviolability, to possession. Dying on the cross, he even gave his Mother away. The last chord before his death was to take from Him even what seemed the most necessary. Before giving up his spirit, he experienced the absence of God. After his death, he didn't even have his own grave. Being the Almighty, He voluntarily took upon Himself every human helplessness, every human experience of loss and stripping.
Abundance in any sphere - including the financial one - is God's blessing. God, infinitely perfect and happy in himself - as the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches - wants to share this happiness with man here. However, he wishes that the good and the gifts that man receives from him should not overwhelm the Giver; did not distract from therelationship with Him.
Sometimes God strips us painfully of the things and matters that seem necessary to us in life, but obscures what is most important: His Love. From what is missing, better is born.
Where I am ailing; where I feel empty, something missing; where I feel helpless; where I begin to experience how insufficient myself I am - there I open myself to God who HAS EVERYTHING, in whom I HAVE EVERYTHING. I open up to what he finally called me to: a relationship with Him.
Where our self-sufficiency lasts too long, there the image of God separates us from His presence. We think, we are enough for ourselves. Only the moments of trial, when there are not enough loaves and fish to feed the family; when there is no wine; when there is a storm, it reveals the helplessness in us. May it make us truly meet the living God, that we will meet not only our images of God, true or untrue, but also meet the living God. The helplessness I have lived shows me that I must entrust my life to God. Without Him, I can do nothing. Nothing at all!
Until Tomorrow
fr. george