This will sound stupid and vain: You're right. I do have a gift. Pray that I may use it to the benefit of the Kingdom and w/o imperiling my soul.
I can hang back no longer, but I am vain and fearful. Please pray that I may give back to God what he has given to me by using it to make his Love known.
I'm serious. I need prayers. It's time to rock 'n roll and I'm tied up in knots.
(3) The Loss of the Child Jesus in the Temple. (Luke 2:43-45)
Because Mary was kept free of the stain of sin, we may conclude that it is no sin to have a sense of the absence of God. And we may profit from Mary's example. When she had that sense, she went to the Temple. We may further assume she and Joseph did not find Jesus the minute they arrived back at the Temple. They had to look around at least a little.
It is, I think, a grace, a sign of God's favor that we become aware of his absence. It is a great and miraculous kindness of God to give us a place where we know we can find him. We Catholics are assured that we will meet him in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar.
This “sorrow”, then, has a moral message that is almost trite: If you seek God, seek him in his house, where he has promised to be. Maybe you won't feel his presence right away. But he is there. Don't stop looking for him!
(4) Mary Meets Jesus on the Way to Calvary.
Unless we are very sick or very wicked, we all want the best for our children. And we also want them to BE the very best. For Mary, these desires and hopes were met and granted in a miraculous way. Her sinless understanding of who and what her son was must have grown and deepened as she watched him grow and followed him on his way to Jerusalem and the dreadful hill.
So I think we must conclude that, while she was tested, while she was in agony, still her faith and other graces must have led her to think that in the torment she shared with her son he was working out a great mystery before her and within her. In their fall, our first parents brought brokenness and pain to all the generations of mankind. In the agony, suffering, and death of our Lord all that brokenness and pain was summed up, soaked up as a sponge soaks up blood, and offered for the saving of the world.
In our Lord and Lady we see that the way of salvation is by no means free of pain. On the contrary, the way leads us into deeper pain until we too come to the point of transmutation where pain is turned to bliss. It is not that she felt no sorrow, no dread of loss. It is that in her sinless faith she saw that it was only through that sorrow and dread, through the loss we all have chosen in some way, that God leads us to himself.
“I can hang back no longer, but I am vain and fearful. Please pray that I may give back to God what he has given to me by using it to make his Love known.
I’m serious. I need prayers. It’s time to rock ‘n roll and I’m tied up in knots.”
Wow - this is EXACTLY what I have been going through for months now, but I couldn’t put my finger on it, until now.
There is a lot of suffering going on in my household (especially DH with cancer), so the Lord is giving us opportunities to offer it all up and we, hopefully, will be strengthened by all of this.
Thank you, and I will continue to pray for all of us.