The love between the Father and the Son is mirrored in the Blessed Virgin and I believe that is the reason why she is so similar to the Holy Spirit – God – Himself…
My husband recently spent some time with his very sick mother. To spend this time with his mother, he had to leave us for a period of time and travel overseas at great inconvenience to himself and sit around and spend time with a very sick old woman.
While he was there, he had limited access to internet and very few luxuries. He spent his nights sleeping on a couch and his days sitting on an uncomfortable chair in a hospital room watching his mother in pain or in sleep.
At one point on this trip, he called and said that he felt that it would have been better to send money to his mother for her treatment than to spend that money on a ticket to travel to see her. He told me that he felt as though it was a complete waste to even be there because he was not even being very useful under the circumstances.
And I knew that he was wrong. You see, we humans are so fallible. We think that if we cannot do something to change the outcome of an event – if we cannot move or shake or shout – that we are somehow achieving nothing at all. And we simply have it all wrong. God puts us on this Earth so that we know love and serve Him and so that we can be with Him forever in Heaven…
And that means that we often have things that God wants us to learn along the way. Sometimes those things are big things – things like the power of the Creator. But sometimes they are very small things. Sometimes – as in my husband’s case – the things that we are supposed to learn are that we should sit quietly and do nothing. Sometimes, the best help we can be is to sit in an uncomfortable chair next to a sick old woman and say nothing and do nothing.
And sometimes it feels as though we are doing nothing at all. Certainly, he was not moving or doing or changing or shouting. Certainly, he seemed to be sitting still.
But, I seem to remember that Christ told us something about that when He said, “I was a stranger and you invited Me in, I needed clothes and you clothed Me, I was sick and you looked after Me, I was in prison and you came to visit Me.” (Matthew 25:31-40).
And the miracle that I experience today is that my husband learned that Bible verse while he was away with his mother. And he learned it sitting in an uncomfortable chair and sleeping on an uncomfortable couch and feeling that he was not doing much at all.
And there seems to me today, no greater miracle than that.
For the Master takes time for our learning – even if it means that He needs to sit quietly beside us in an uncomfortable chair in a hospital room, next to a sick old lady…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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