LET’S hope that we can avoid some reproaching words of Christ because of our lack of faith and of our inability to relate everything to God. Remember that in the gospel of St. Luke, Christ made this complaint:
“As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be in the days of the Son of Man; they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage up to the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all.” (7, 26-27)
We have to realize that there will be a day of reckoning at the end of time or our death when Christ will come again to ask for an accounting of what we have done in this world. We need to be ready for this day. In fact, at the end of each day, we should have some kind of rehearsal for this day of reckoning by making an examination of conscience before going to bed.
That way we would be able to monitor the developments of our life and see if we are still on the right track. We would be ready to make an accounting of what we have done with what God has given us.
We should not allow ourselves to simply be swallowed up by our earthly concerns. That happens when we allow our earthly and temporal activities to dominate us rather than us dominating them and using them to lead us back to God.
Thus, we have to be wary of our feelings and emotions to dominate us in our life. It should be faith that should lead and shape our life. And it has to animate our bodily faculties — our feelings, emotions, passions, imagination, etc. Otherwise, we would be trapped in our material world, unable to discern the spiritual and supernatural realities.
In this regard, we have to realize that everything can and should be related to God. Whether it is good or bad, according to some human standards, or a victory or a loss, a blessing or a curse, absolutely everything can be related to God as long as we handle them the way God wants us to handle them.
This divine way of handling all possible situations and everything else in our life has been shown to us already by Christ. Thus we need to look at Christ closely and continually. More than that, we need to identify ourselves with Christ who actually identifies himself with us in all our possible situations. Christ is God who became man so that all human realities can be related back to God.
When things are good, we can thank God or praise him. When things are bad, we can always ask for pardon, for more grace. On the part of God, he will always give us his mercy. He is quick to forgive.
If there is some kind of punishment for any sin that we may have committed, we can be sure the punishment will always be for our own good, for our purification. God does not punish us solely for the sake of punishing us for our sins. He is not vindictive.
We need to train ourselves to relate everything to God by way of following the example, and more than that, also by identifying ourselves with Christ who makes this identification possible through his grace, the sacraments, his word, etc.
Thus, we need to meditate often on Christ’s life, on his words and deeds. It should be a habit with us to spend some time daily for this meditation, so we can become familiar with all his ways of coping with our human condition./PN
