A Reflection for Wednesday of the Twenty-sixth Week in Abnormal Time
God is smart in heart and mighty in strength;
who has withstood him and remained unscathed? (Jb 9:4)
“How was your trip?!”
Once I returned from my first Christmas break service immersion trip in college, friends asked me this query in the very same tone of voice through which they asked other friends about their family holiday gatherings and fun vacations. On their brisk walk to class or to the dining hall, I could tell they only had time for a bite-size answer.
“It was great!” I lied.
Lying may be too strong a way of putting it. My trip to the U.S.-Mexico border in early 2018 was hands-down probably the most moving, eye-opening, radicalizing thing I had ever done. I used to be convinced I had had an actual experience of God through the people I met there. It had also ruined me, making a smooth return to the brand new semester on my idyllic college campus unattainable.
The parties, lunch conversations and even Masses I had enjoyed on campus just just a few weeks earlier didn’t feel the identical anymore; while my friends gave the impression to be breezing through the every day routine of a faculty student, I felt stuck within the weighty experiences of my trip, continuously fearful that I couldn’t reconcile my every day life with the realities I had seen firsthand while traveling.
Jesus is a force who comes into your life and shakes it up—possibly for the higher, but rarely for the more comfortable.
While I felt like nobody understood on the time, I’ve since learned that my experience isn’t unique. Many individuals who engage in prolonged service or immersion struggle to reintegrate into their every day lives when the experience is over. (Jack Morris, the Jesuit who began the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, coined the phrase “ruined for all times” to explain the impact the service program had on its young participants.)
The poetry of Job in today’s first reading brings this truth vibrantly to life, describing God’s earth-shattering grandeur. In a little bit of a harsh rendering, he asks, “Who has withstood him and remained unscathed?”
Within the Gospel reading, too, Jesus is a force who comes into your life and shakes it up—possibly for the higher, but rarely for the more comfortable. When followers promise to go wherever he goes, he warns them they won’t have a consistent place to call home; it won’t be easy. Once they ask for time to wish their families farewell and even to bury a dead parent before joining Jesus, he urges them to look forward, not back, and makes no bones in regards to the sacrifices a life with him would require.
When we’ve got an actual encounter with God, life as we’ve known it ceases to feel the identical, and truth be told, that typically doesn’t feel excellent at first. The change is uncomfortable, and we are able to’t guarantee that the people around us will understand or will follow our exact timeline of knowing and learning.
It is going to sting, that’s needless to say. But that sting is the sign that you just’re growing—and even higher, that God’s love is behind it.
