So, Friday was a bit of a break for me in my meal planning saga as my husband took our kids out to an event. Come to think of it, I never did eat dinner! No wonder I'm hungry....
I'm thinking I'm on to something. I'm discerning a gentle theme developing in my life. It started with Willa's post on acedia that I wrote about here. And I focus in on Piper's defining the term as closing oneself to the demand that arises from one's own dignity.
Then, I'm back at that meal planning. "Demands that arise from one's own dignity..." Not demands arising from external sources...
What I'm feeling is this gentle call to invest and work with the graces God has put in my life. Why does this strike me as a bit of a heavy thing? I think it is a positive way of saying God is exposing my sin of acedia in my life and drawing me to repent. I'm reminded of pulling up ivy out of our side lot, as I have been doing this week. You yank at one tendril and find it pulls up something three feet away. I'm just in the process of seeing what all is connected by this thread.
Some of the connected stuff: suffering a bout of feeling unique. I have never been one to be afraid to be different or to stand out, but sometimes I just get weary. I go through my life, happy as a clam, walking in step with the Spirit as best as I can, and then every once in a while a curtain is pulled back and I realize how vastly different my life is compared to not only almost everyone in the world, but even almost everyone I know. I know there is divine purpose in my "different" path (of eating, of education, of family building, of spiritual focus, of parenting, you name it). I know it is about me drawing near to Christ, and being able to draw nearer to my brothers and sisters, despite what I perceive as either our similarities or our differences. Sometimes I just get weary of the "she has two heads" kind of reaction.
Then I hear John Michael Talbot's words reverberating in my ears: When you follow the Lord, you will be different from everyone else. So do not be afraid to be different.
I think the Lord makes us not only different from "the world," but different from Christian brothers and sisters -- unique, I should say -- because we need to find our communion in and with Him, ultimately. Our hearts can never correspond to other loved ones, not entirely. We are made for God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Him.
Maybe you do this too: sometimes when Our Lord puts a challenge before me, I test out how it would be to just ignore His proposal for a little while. Then, life starts to suck, and to keep my sanity I have to go back to the Lord and say "to whom shall I go? You alone have the words of everlasting life."
Well, what do you know. It is the wee hours of Saturday morning, the Saturday when I'm due to go to confession. Gee. Amazing coincidence.
1 comment:
Hi sweetie, came to check in while waiting for those files to load. God makes us different from our Christian brothers and sisters for more than one reason -- there's also this one: he loves, delights in, variety. I mean, look at the flowers -- could we live in a world where there were only tulips? I love the tulips, with an aching kind of love, but I could never imagine a world with ONLY tulips! He loves your tulipness, and he loves my peonyness. My life is so much richer for being exposed to all the new worlds you have introduced me to. But I think you're on to something -- without God, it's impossible for us to find it in us to delight in difference (I am thinking of Fr. Giussani's definition of forgiveness: "The capacity to tolerate difference.") His mercy also has in it this delighting in our difference, delighting in our frailty (or should I say "fragility" or "vulnerability") and littleness. Only when we rest secure in his palm, can we delight in others' difference...?
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