Partners

We are therefore Christ's embassadors, as though God were making His appeal through us: Be reconciled to God. -- 2 Corinthians 5:20

I feel like I just heard this reading today at the funeral I attended. If I didn't, it has been resonating of its own accord. But I'm fairly certain that was the context. 

It sums up well the lightbulb that went off when last I wrote. Well, that's misleading, because it wasn't so much an idea that I had as a "light shining in a dark place" as 2 Peter 1:19 would have it -- the dark place being my own grasp of my life. ("We have the prophetic message as something altogether reliable, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.")

God calls me into a partnership with Him. He calls me into union with Him, as a bride with the Bridegroom. My sense of that parallel is a bit fraught with stuff, not unlike I wrote last time about my concepts of penance and Lent in general. So much fraughtedness in my history. But a partnership... My sense of this is He calls me to share His life, His work, His heart. To learn from Him not only to imitate, but to actually receive His own presence, His own power.

When a woman gives birth, while her body is fully engaged (or is, ideally), so is the body of the child. The child actually sends out the hormones that trigger the beginning of labor, or so I'm told. If the Holy Spirit is the life within us which we do not create but we receive and are given, so the Spirit initiates things within us, which then engage us fully (ideally). This partnership is mysterious. 

I remember vividly seeing my daughter's face for the first time as my midwife handed her up to me. Her eyes were already searching for me and seeking that first contact. It was almost like she was welcoming me into motherhood as much as I was welcoming her into life. Maybe I expected a more passive glancing partner. She was 100% intent on connecting with me. There had been this whole hidden exchange whereby she took in everything I did, everything I heard, everything I ate, everything I felt. 

The Holy Spirit knows me on a completely different level, being God. But I am like the clueless mother who is surprised to find this life inside. When my daughter was born I had struggled with infertility for five years, and in some ways, it took me right up to birth and even after to realize that I carried an actual human baby inside me. I was in awe even days later that it was a baby that came out of me. I remember a few days before she was born, my breasts were producing colostrum already, and the thought escaped my mouth with a gasp: "I'm pregnant!" (At the time I was like nine months and 10 days pregnant, but it was still a shock.)

So, yeah. What is striking me is the awesome reality that the Holy Spirit actually lives within me and speaks, acts, moves, calls, shapes my life. That I can act in partnership with God. In fact, this reality is essential to my design as a human being. 

God makes his appeal through me. That is freaking awesome.