I should be praying more for the salvation of souls, because perhaps that is the only thing I shall ever be able to do to help alleviate the sadness and frustration of my Blessed Lord…
I run a bookkeeping business these days.
I was trained as an accountant and after the various changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself in the not-so-unique position of needing to reconsider my employment and the ways that I did work. It was not that the other work I had been doing did not exist anymore, it is that it no longer served a purpose in my life that made it a worthwhile full-time endeavour.
And so it was that I decided to use this set-back as an opportunity to move forward in a different capacity from the one that I had imagined in my life before.
I have always understood bookkeeping. And – though others might laugh at me for this – I have always found some comfort in being able to apply a set of rather meaningless rules to the allocation of numbers to restore order to chaos and to bring the apparent random nature of numbers into a story that can explain the workings of a business…
The interesting thing about bookkeeping is that accounts need to be reconciled. And what that really means in a practical sense, is that the account in one part of the “books” need to match what is in the account in another part of the books. When a person is trying to reconcile an account they must use their logic and also their investigation skills to work out where something is missing.
This means that I spend most of my time looking for lost things and when they are found, putting those lost things in the correct place so that they can contribute to the unity of the story. And I have been thinking about this today, because it reminds me of the ways that Christ came in search of the lost sheep.
Just as the books are incomplete when the numbers are allocated incorrectly and the errors need to be located so that the books can be corrected, so too does Christ’s flock have errors if there are sheep missing. And it is for this reason that Christ goes out to find the lost sheep – because He is wanting to complete His flock. And I have been reflecting on that today, because when I cannot find the error in the accounts, I find the experience very frustrating. And I have been considering the amplification of the frustration of God when He sees a soul in the wrong pasture – so to speak…
And when I think about that today it occurs to me that this is a truly terrible thing to frustrate the Creator of the Universe. Because He created all things as GOOD and there is no frustration in that. And it seems to me today that I should be praying more for the salvation of souls, because perhaps that is the only thing I shall ever be able to do to help alleviate the sadness and frustration of my Blessed Lord…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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