Next Sunday’s gospel centers on something that many of us face: worry.
Researchers tell us that 90% of what we worry about never happens and even the 10% that does happen, often those issues don’t warrant the energy that worry takes from us.
Indeed worry can be a fruitless exercise. After all do any of us gain anything from worry? Wouldn’t it be more fruitful to expect bad things to happen from time to time and consider what one’s next step might be and having the confidence that they can get past whatever might come their way with God’s help?
Now there’s a statement of faith: God will never abandon me. God will help me figure out something that will bring me out of the doldrums.
And that’s a tough thing to believe.
The Israelites weren’t very good at believing that. They even grumbled to the point where Isaiah has to remind them that mothers don’t forget their children and that God’s love for us is far deeper than that!
Could God really be enough for us? Could God really, in some way, turn everything around? Is the deepest love that we experience between say, mother and child or husband and wife not even close to the immensity of God’s love for us?
To go a step further, can we trust that God can be a perfect forgiver of our sins? That is another tough pill to swallow. God indeed offers us forgiveness when we don’t deserve it in our own selfishness. For those times that we don’t believe that God’s love is enough for us, when we choose something over God…God still offers us grace. Grace, a free gift that we often ignore in favor of staying in our own worry that perhaps God’s love will run out.
Faith in God puts us in the crosshairs of trusting that God is always present for us, committed to us and more than enough for us. Can we allow ourselves to be satisfied with that…or are we always seeking for “the other”? That elusive peace that we often think comes with success.
Let us pray today that God allows us to see the gift of grace. May we always choose God over our other temptations and may we be patient as we wait to be open enough to feel God’s presence in our lives.