I need a relationship with God. This I have come to realize. I need to be fully immersed in His grace, and let Him guide me and lead me through this life. I need to do my morning and evening prayers and get my daily dose of scripture. I like to pray my rosary, and I long to attend daily Mass at lunch once or twice throughout the week in addition to Sundays. I love going to Adoration and I really do love the cleansing aspect of confession – it’s just like taking a shower on a nice summer day after working out in the sun, washing all the grime off of you.
This is how I like to live life, with God and our faith as the focal point of my family. He’s the hub. The rest of life just plugs in, like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. Life is not easy. There are good times and bad, just as you all know. And there are many days where I have to start over, but that is the great thing about our faith. We can always start fresh.
I wasn’t always like this.
For a long time, I tried to live life on my own. I tried to do it my way. It didn’t work out so well. And the harder I tried to do it my way, the more I sunk into that quicksand. I felt that if bad things happened, or I encountered challenges, I could tough it out and be a man! I didn’t need God – I can do it all by myself. Prayer and spirituality and things like retreats were for the weak. I wasn’t weak – I was strong.
Stay the course was my motto, but I was staying on my course. And the course was leading me in the wrong direction, only for the longest time I could not see it. I thought I could always get control, and steer my way out of trouble – but when certain troubles came my way, I hit ‘em head on like a wall. It took some major blows – professionally, financially, and personally before I realized one simple fact – that I am weak.
We are all weak. We all have those things we cannot resist – the anger and resentment that we have towards those close to us, the jealousy we have of others and the desire for material things and money that consume us. We have our addictions and those things that we lust after, that we think will fill a void in our hearts – money, political power, drugs and alcohol, or pornography and sex. We have desires to look and be like other people, the celebrities that we think we need to emulate. All of this is our weakness. Each one of us have one, two, three, or countless more weaknesses in our life where we seek fulfillment or take our frustrations out on others. But the only true fulfillment, that one thing that will make us whole is a relationship with Christ. And when we realize this, we will be strong.
I’m sure you’re thinking, “how can I be strong through my weaknesses?” That is so opposed to the society we live in today. We need to be tough, and strong, and show no weakness when we encounter hardships and trials. But it’s through these trials and hardships, that if we surrender to Christ and let him take control, as St. Paul says, we will be strong. God will use our hardships to build character and discipline to help us and others better withstand trials down the road and do good to others. Our hardships and our afflictions keep us humble, and humility is the path to Heaven.
I remember a time in those years where I was trying to control my life – my wife and I had accumulated some significant debt. I remember at the time, I always was looking for the quick fix. But what I did not realize is that if God had blessed us with a quick fix, we quite possibly would have went back into debt because we would not have built the discipline necessary to stay out of debt. We would not have put in the hard work and patience to earn it.
The thing is, I had no clue how we were going to get out of debt. I had no answer. My wife and I had nowhere else to turn to but Christ. That was the only thing that He needed to hear. It’s difficult to maintain discipline, especially in today’s world where people have everything in an instant, there is all kinds of material excess and people pay later for what they want now. My wife and I go through times when we need to regroup, and there is always that temptation I have to splurge on something, but this is just a thorn in my side. As St. Paul writes today:
That I, Paul, might not become too elated, because of the abundance of the revelations, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, an angel of Satan, to beat me, to keep me from being too elated.
A thorn reminding me to be humble and keep me from getting too elated, and too confident in my abilities. A thorn reminding me that my true longing is for God, and that He fills the void in my heart, not material things. It’s a thorn that keeps me focused on Christ and keeps me longing for a relationship, because sometimes, I don’t know how we’ve been able to make it but for the grace of God. And believe me, I have many, many more thorns in my flesh for other things…
And so that is one thing that todays readings are about – being content and even thankful for those thorns that are in our flesh. Those things that Satan thrusts in there, that as we’ve talked about in recent weeks, God uses for good and greater blessings.
Ezekiel is warned about this type of thorn in the first reading, where the Israelites are a rebellious people who may not listen, but nonetheless, God asks Ezekiel to profess His word. And in the Gospel, Jesus is humbled a bit in His hometown, amongst His friends and family and is simply amazed and dumfounded at their lack of faith. Both the prophet and Jesus dealt with the thorn of persecution, but yet the more they were persecuted and the greater the trials, the more they longed for God.
This is our gift in our hardships and trials. God uses them to bring us closer to Him. And if we seek Him and desire to be in a more intimate relationship with Him, those hardships and trials may not go away, but we will begin to thank God for them because without them, we may not have the relationship with Christ that we do.
The more I reflect on life and look at my weakness, the more I turn to Christ for His guidance and strength, and the more I long for Him. Life can be great, and it is OK to enjoy the fruits of our labor, but we need to stay humble and always look to Him for guidance. I still look at life with the motto stay the course, but now I let Jesus define my path – for when I am weak, I am strong.
