If we could only readily welcome God in our life

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

Chaplain

Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE)

Talamban, Cebu City

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com

WE should do everything to be able to readily welcome God in our life. When we manage to do so, we would be apt to share his power too, and like him we can do great things, even miraculous things.

We are reminded of this truth of our Christian faith in the first reading of the Mass of Wednesday of the Easter Octave. (cfr. Acts 3,1-10) Sts. Peter and John went to the temple area and met a crippled man who begged for some alms. But instead of giving alms, St. Peter, strongly invoking the name of Christ, told the fellow to rise and walk, and the cripple started to walk!

“I have neither silver nor gold,” St. Peter told the cripple, “but what I do have I give you: in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazorean, rise and walk.” And the miracle happened.

We should strengthen our belief that if we truly welcome in our life God who, in the first place, takes the initiative to share what he has with us, we too can do what God can. We would be apt to do great things. Obviously, what God shares with us can only be what is truly good for us. We cannot and should not invoke his name to do something that is evil or not in accordance to the will of God.

Let’s remind ourselves frequently, if not constantly, of this wonderful reality, so that we can truly say that we are doing things always with God and not simply by our own selves. It’s not presumptuous of us to remind ourselves of this truth of our faith. We really are meant to share our life with God.

This awareness and conviction of this truth of our faith is necessary for us, since we cannot deny that in our life we will encounter all sorts of challenges, difficulties and temptations and sin, and we should just know how to handle them properly.

When these challenges, difficulties, etc. come, we should immediately remind ourselves of this wonderful truth that God is always with us and is eager to help us, though in ways that may not be accordance to our expectations.

A healthy spirit of abandonment in God’s hands is necessary even as we exhaust all possible human means to achieve our goals or simply to tackle all the challenges, trials and predicaments of our life. We should never forget this truth of our faith.

In this life, we need to acquire a good, healthy sporting spirit, because life is actually like a game. Yes, life is like a game. We set out to pursue a goal, we have to follow certain rules, we are given some means, tools and instruments, we are primed to win and we do our best, but losses can come, and yet, we just have to move on.

Woe to us when we get stuck with our defeats and failures, developing a loser’s mentality. That would be the epic fail that puts a period and a finis in a hanging narrative, when a comma, a colon or semi-colon would have sufficed.

We need a sporting spirit because life’s true failure can come only when we choose not to have hope. That happens when our vision and understanding of things is narrow and limited, confined only to the here and now and ignorant of the transcendent reality of the spiritual and supernatural world.