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April 2008 Issue
Back to Feature
Articles
God sows divine life
through ordinary folks
| It's
hard for us mortal creatures to wrap our minds around
the immortal Creator. We come into life with capacities
that seem puny in the face of all the forces confronting
us. Yet, when God brings us into being, another exciting
new chapter in the union of the divine with the human
begins to unfold. The highlights of that story are in
the Bible. There we find the meaning and purpose of
what God is doing. We also find in those sacred pages
the amazing ways that God works. Invariably, God rescues
us from ourselves and brings us safely and surely into
a deeper and higher form of living - into God's ways
of loving and serving. The preferred instruments that
God uses in the course of this ongoing rescue plan are
our own fellow human beings. Sometimes they have been
people with earthly power and influence. |
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Most often they have been ordinary folks or
even some who might be considered useless or ridiculous. Because
of their age or their social condition or their hopeless lack
of any human promise, they would be written off by the wise
and sensible of this world. Not by God. Instead, God seems
to relish doing special favors for us through the most unlikely
human partners. That's why we read of a Sarah and Abraham
too old to bear children and start a family, let alone a nation.
With God they become fertile. That's why we read of a David
too young and inexperienced to do anything important for God,
with only a beginner shepherd's resume, yet summoned to lead
a nation and shepherd God's people. That's why Jesus would
accept a young boy's two fish and five barley loaves to feed
a crowd of several thousand. That's why, finally, Christ would
entrust a chastened Peter, who had so miserably failed him
in his hour of need, with feeding his lambs and sheep. Age
does not matter to God when God has work to be done. Our condition
of life is no obstacle to God when God has divine life to
sow in even fallow human soil. We all are privileged servants.
Msgr. Gaspar F. Ancona is recently retired.
He is the author of Where the Star Came to Rest, a history
of the Diocese of Grand Rapids.
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