Day 40 True Freedom

 Day 40!  You think we would be done with Lent but the Church doesn't count the Sundays.  I wonder if Jesus took Sunday's off when He was in the desert?  

I digress, and another digression, it appears my dog will be okay!  Apparently he has an infection of the intestine and not an abdomen riddled with tumor; God be praised!  Thank you Dad and St Francis for your prayers.  

 [ Warning, the above picture is old, both of us are a lot greyer now, I am on the left.]

Back to Thomas since I have electricity!   He talks about his time as a novice at the abbey.  Nothing too spell binding here except that when he arrives at the abbey the Monk who greets him asks, "This time have you come to stay?" He replies, "Yes, Brother if you'll pray for me."  And the monk replies,

"That's what I have been doing, praying for you." 

I would like to go back to something Thomas writes about how he felt on the way to the abbey.  When he wasn't sure if he would be accepted, if he would end up in the army or what exactly would happen.  He writes:

I was free. I had recovered my liberty. I belonged to God, not to myself: and to belong to Him is to be free, free of all the anxieties and worries and sorrows that belong to this earth, and the love of the things that are in it. What was the difference between one place and another, one habit and another, if your life belonged to God, and if you placed yourself completely in His hands?  The only thing that mattered was the fact of the sacrifice, the essential dedication of one's self, one's will.  The rest was only accidental.  pg 370

 I suspect I could spend all of lent on this paragraph.  This is akin to Loyola's surrendering of the will to God.  But it isn't that simple is it?  We can't just sit around giving ourselves to God [ even if we could]  because we have to love one another.  Dealing with "one another" is often stressful.  Remember the "holy grind" from the beginning of lent?  

To keep this post from being 25 pages we will concentrate on one aspect of the human experience in light of the above paragraph.  My dog is very ill.  Ideally I am not concerned because God has it under control.  " Not a sparrow falls to the ground without God knowing," and all that... Loyola would tell me to pray for whatever will bring greater glory to God.  That is great but I have a relationship with my dog which is also a good thing.   And God has asked us to pray for what we want.  So I think I did okay, I prayed for my desired outcome and enlisted St Francis and my Dad but realized that God had it under control and if Turner died that it was okay.  I will grade myself out as a B.

My prayer for today, Lord, thank you for hearing my prayer for my dog.  Help me to better realize that "Your ways" are not the world's ways and "Your thoughts" are not the world's thoughts.  Help me trust in you even more fully.  And again, Thanks.  Amen

Pax

 

Joe