By Fr. Roy Cimagala *
MAKE no mistake about this. The little, ordinary things of our daily life can and should be pathways to reach and be with God. This truth of our Christian faith has been amply proclaimed by Christ in many of the parables he used to describe how the kingdom of God is.
“This is how it is with the Kingdom of God; it is as if a man were to scatter seed on the land and would sleep and rise night and day and the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how,” he said (Mk 4,26-27), practically telling us that the heaven can be reached through the daily routine we have.
Still more, he said, “To what shall we compare the Kingdom of God…it is like a mustard seed that, when it is sown in the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth. But once it is sown, it springs up and becomes the largest of plants and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the sky can dwell in its shade.” (Mk 4,31-32)
We have to be strongly reminded that God is everywhere and is always intervening in our lives. He is actually directing our life toward himself, since that is will for us, as it is for all his creation. He is never absent in our life, even in our worst moments. He is always solicitous of our needs, giving us light and strength, and showering us with his love that also teaches us how to suffer the unavoidable troubles we will have in this life.
The challenge for us is how to correspond properly to this truth of our faith, to this reality of our life. Again, we cannot overemphasize our need to spend time to develop a contemplative spirit even while immersed in our worldly affairs, so that we can always be in God’s presence and know how to correspond to his abiding interventions.
And so, we can be sure that Christ is always in our daily routine and in the little, ordinary things of our daily life. We have to learn how to perceive the divine in the mundane. We have to learn to find Christ in the little things which comprise most of our day, if not of our whole life.
Let’s always remember that Christ is God made man. As God, he is involved in our creation, in our getting into existence. As such, since its existence is involved in creation, he cannot withdraw from us, since by doing so would be like God withdrawing from our existence. Since we obviously exist, ergo, he is in and with us by the very fact of our existence.
As God and man, he is our redeemer, the one who, in a manner of speaking, would redo or re-create us after our original state of humanity has been damaged by our sin.
As such, since we all need to be redeemed at all times, he neither can withdraw from us, since by doing so would be like God-and-man, Jesus Christ, withdrawing from our redemption. Since we need to be redeemed always, Christ is also always with us. He actually cannot help but redeem us, because of his great love for us.
We need to be more aware of this reality about ourselves, since we often do not realize it, dominated as we are with the merely material and sensible realities and with what is the here-and-now and what is immediately felt. We many times fail to go beyond this level.
* Chaplain Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City
Email: roycimagala@gmail.com
