“God's almighty grace helps us overcome obstacles ...love doubles our strength, makes us inventive, makes us feel content and inwardly free. If people would only realise what God has in store for those who love Him!” (Blessed Engelmar Unzeitig).
So much of this life is around preparation.
When we are born, we are prepared to grow older. We are completely dependent on our mothers, then on our parents and then on our family. Later we get older and rely on our friends – human beings are a social group. Later we rely on ourselves a little more.
And all of these steps are a sort of preparation or foundation for us to get ready for whatever it is that God has in store for us during our life…
Christ said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. ‘Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house upon the rock; and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.’” (Matthew 7:21.24-27).
And I have been reflecting on the foundations of faith. SO many times when I consider the lives of the Saints I see that they have endured terrible trials and despite – or perhaps BECAUSE – of those trials, the Saints have been able to develop more meaningful and purposeful relationships with God.
By the time that Pope Saint John Paul II became the Holy Father, he had no surviving family. His mother and father and siblings were all dead. And this must have seemed such a sad thing – after all it is surely nobody’s wish to be the last remaining member of their own family.
However, I wonder now – considering the life of that Saint through a spiritual lens – whether the deaths of those people who loved the Saint so much, could have helped him to achieve his mission as assigned by God. After all, it is not just the suffering that he endured that prepared him for his pontificate, but also – perhaps – their prayers for him from Heaven, which provided the Grace for his actions…
Blessed Engelmar Unzeitig who was killed by the Nazi’s in Dachau concentration camp in 1945 volunteered as a pastor to the Russians in the camp. He studied Russian to better minister to the prisoners. He volunteered to care for the victims of typhoid, and later contracted the disease himself and died from it.
He wrote to his sister, before he died, “God's almighty grace helps us overcome obstacles ...love doubles our strength, makes us inventive, makes us feel content and inwardly free. If people would only realise what God has in store for those who love Him!” This man was known as the “Angel of Dachau”. And today, I cannot help thinking that his life and sufferings laid the foundations ot prepare him for that death…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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