First of all, I would like to apologize to our readers for the delay in publishing this reflection prior to Sunday. To be honest, my daughter tripped and fell and has a concussion, and my family unexpectedly had to rush to another city an hour away to take care of our daughter and her newborn baby too. Our daughter has been sick for at least 2 weeks, and her accident was just the last straw. We are all so exhausted…
Of course a new baby cries a lot, needs to have a bottle every 2-3 hours, has to be burped, have her diaper changed, and be rocked to sleep. We also needed to take care of our daughter too, who is in a lot of pain and hasn’t slept for days either.
I do not know that the words will come very easy for this reflection, because I am so tired and my thinking is not clear right now, and my emotions are certainly not peaceful and uplifting at the moment….
Does this sound like I’m complaining??? The people in the first reading for Mass today were grumbling against Moses too. Life was hard and they couldn’t handle it. They needed someone to blame, and Moses was who they vented their anger on. Moses was even afraid they would stone him if they didn’t get some water soon. (Kind of like how our family feels right now … that we will have a melt down if we don’t get some sleep soon too.)
God gave the Israelites the water though. He gave them what they needed and they stopped quarreling and grumbling, and instead began to praise Him saying, “Is the Lord in our midst or not?”
Then, the gospel today is a beautiful account of the Samaritan woman at the well. Most of us know this story very well. Jesus told her everything about her life, even though he had never met her before. She came to truly believe that, “the Lord was in their midst” because of this. Later, the townspeople listened to Jesus for themselves and came to believe in him too, that he truly was the Messiah, the savior of the world. They also believed that, “the Lord was in their midst”.
As I write these words, a calm is beginning to enter my mind and heart, as I remember the last time that I truly felt like, “the Lord is in our midst”.
It was just last night. Our daughter was hurt, and we rushed to get her and the baby at 3 am, in the middle of the night. It was a crisis that no one was prepared for. Everything seemed to go wrong. We didn’t have all the things the baby needed at our home, and my daughter’s clothes were not packed … we couldn’t think straight after being woke up from a sound sleep. We were unprepared for this crisis.
Later, we were driving back home with our daughter and her head was on my lap in the back seat. I was feeding the baby in the car seat on the other side. My daughter had just stopped crying and so had the baby. It was quiet. I looked around the interior of the car, and a moment of awe came over me at the sight of my family sitting together, united in their love for one another.
I prayed for three years for our entire family to be reunited. For us to be a family again, and here it was … Jesus answered my prayers most beautifully. We were a real family again, warts and all.
I couldn’t stop the tears that began rolling down my cheeks in the silence of our car. My heart filled up to the point that I could no longer keep my gratitude contained within my heart. I spoke the words out loud, “thank God for our family”. I told my husband, son, daughter, grandbaby and even our little granddaughter that wasn’t with us, “I love you”. Everyone else choked up too, and one by one, each one of them also said, “I love you.”
“The Lord was in our midst” in the still, dark, quiet of the night. We drove on in silence, enveloped in love.
I remember now, that even in the chaos … “the Lord is in our midst”.
I pray that when life gets rough for you one day, that you will be able to pause for a moment too, and remember a time when you felt the Lord’s presence most powerfully present in your life. Jesus never leaves our side. He’s always there, even during all the ups and downs and times of crisis in our lives.
May the peace of Jesus Christ be with you and with your family today too. May He envelope you and your family in His love, and bring you His healing peace.
