We can think we're dead, when we're just about to come back to life. We can be convinced all is lost, when all is about to be found. Our circumstances can seem horrible, but they might be the path of our transformation into who God has always intended us to be.
Amongst the Christmas presents I received a couple of months ago, I received a plant. It's a most unusual one, quite resilient, not needing to be watered. I didn't even ensure it got much sunlight; I just placed it on the table near the window in my cell. Nevertheless, as the weeks passed, slowly it grew, eventually blossoming from short green shoots into tall, red, wide open flowers.
After about a month, the vivid red flowers wilted and shriveled, darkening to such a shade of purple that one could have misperceived it was black. I'd figured its glory had come and gone. Then in the last couple of weeks, I saw new bright red flowers budding out of it. After not too long, they burst open, announcing the triumphant rebirth of this determined plant...
As you can see, there are other points where the stalks which had been darkening are in fact lightening into a brighter green. Under decay, growth springs up. Through all that seems to shake us to our core, we are being called into new life.
As we grapple with the coronavirus, as it brings us the social distancing and the lockdowns, as we struggle with the isolation and its attendant emotional and psychological and spiritual challenges, as we lose financial resources amidst the constrictions on the economy, through it all we are being invited to be remade. In each of these changes in our lives, we are presented with chances to grow.
Recently I was blessed to witness such remarkable personal transformation. A friend of mine came to visit me here at the hermitage. When he showed up, I saw that he had become quite slender. He said that once the lockdown had set in and he was spending so much time at home, he kept looking at his exercise bike. He concluded it had been ridiculous how he had been using it as a clothes rack. The clothes came off the bike, and he went onto the bike. Each day he spent a little more time on the bike, gradually losing weight. He embraced an opportunity brought by the virus to live more healthily and thus come closer to being who he has been meant to be.
Another friend of mine is also seeing fruits of personal transformation due to his embracing the chances presented to him during this time of the virus. He also came here less than a year ago, following a call to attend to his soul, to spend time in prayer and work and spiritual reading. Having valued what he has had to learn on his spiritual journey, he has reached a point such that in less than half an hour, he is going to be baptized.
We are coming into new growth not despite of all that besets us, but precisely because we are being given these marvelous chances which seem harrowing but truly are calls to rise up and become our true selves. Fire may devastate the landscape, reducing much of the foliage to ashes, but do not forget that we came from ashes. As we begin Lent, this Ash Wednesday, let us remember that before we return to ashes, we have many more deaths and rebirths waiting for us along the way, which are not mishaps but blessings.
All may seem dead. Yet when all seems lost, we are being given outstanding opportunities. It is precisely when it seems that we have little reason to hope that we are invited to have faith. When we go forward in faith, trusting in God, then God can work wonders through us, bringing us back to life. In faith we are brought to new life.
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