By Sister Mary Scholastica, O.C.D.
Your personal story, your life journey colors the lens out of which you see. The wonderful thing is that our lenses keep shifting like our eyesight. It’s just a different kind of sight.
Celebrating our Fathers – this can mean all sorts of things for you and me depending on our own relationship with our earthly father. This short reflection is on our Heavenly Father through my lens … at least my lens at this time. Hopefully as I move through the years, the focus becomes sharper, the peripheries become more visible and the ability to step back and see a bigger part of the picture at hand becomes more natural.
I have always loved St. Therese’s image of our Heavenly Father. She speaks of Him as going before her on the road and removing all the stones in her path so that as she’s skipping along with all the carefree abandon of a child, she doesn’t trip. And because He does this without her seeing it, she has no idea that she even needs to thank Him.
I think all of us, if we were to pause and pray through our personal histories would be able to see and experience what Therese speaks about. It’s become a constant in my own life. God is so faithful. He just is. And when you know this, you see His hand at work EVERYWHERE, even through the toughest times of life. Why He allows those tough moments, I do not know. I think only in heaven will we see this amazing tapestry before us – the beautiful colors, the weaving, the intricacies and the knots that actually add contour to the image. We tend to see the backside and all the strings tangled and would prefer to take some scissors and cut it all off. But if we do that, we miss the amazing image that God is creating with every moment in our lives.
Father’s Day reminds us that God is faithful. That He is our Father. He is watching out for us. He wants us to reach out and hold His hand. And He assures us that He never lets go. Oftentimes, we’re the ones who wriggle our hands free because we want to do our own thing, take our own path.
As I look back through the years, reflecting on some of the toughest moments that seemed interminable at the time, I now see how He was with me. I see how He allowed some things to come to pass and how those moments of adversity made me a bit more comfortable in my own skin. He sent people to walk with me during times of fear and insecurity. And He sent them in ways that I did not understand. Yet in the long-run, some of these people have become images of God the Father to me.
These ramblings are mostly for us to remember that though we may not
understand, nor see, nor sometimes even believe, we need to know that God is with us. He goes before us, walks beside us and desires only our good. If we move through each day resting in His promise that He will never leave us, our Father in heaven will lead us one day at a time closer to our eternal home, where in the deepest recesses of our heart, we desire to be.
