Reflection for Saturday, December 5, 2015

Saturday of the First Week of Advent
IS 30:19-21, 23-26
PS 147:1-2, 3-4, 5-6
MT 9:35 --10:1, 5A, 6-8

Sometimes I picture myself in the disciples’ shoes as Jesus sends them out to do Kingdom work. I hear a grand, booming voice and usually visualize Morgan Freeman looking me deep into the soul with his wise old eyes, boldly and articulately telling me to: “GO! to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, make this proclamation: ‘The Kingdom of heaven is at hand!’ Cure the sick! Raise the dead! Cleanse lepers! Drive out demons! Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give.” (Emphases added for effect.) When I leave that daydream, I spring out of my chair shouting, “Yes, God! Send me! I want to cure the sick and raise the dead!” Then, my roommates look at me strangely and I calmly sit back down. The Lord’s voice sends us out and “sounds in our ears” in peculiar ways. I’m reading a book called The Sacred Journey by Frederick Buechner that explains God’s language, “the alphabet of grace,” in this way: “Like the Hebrew alphabet, the alphabet of grace has no vowels, and in that sense his words to us are always veiled, subtle, cryptic, so that it is left to us to delve their meaning, to fill in the vowels, for ourselves…the meaning of the incarnate word is the meaning it has for the one it is spoken to, the meaning that becomes clear and effective in our lives only when we ferret it out for ourselves.”

Personally, I find it exhilarating when I think I can hear the voice of God so clearly spoken to me through his Word, my brothers and sisters in Christ, or simply everyday life. Every once in a while, I catch myself hesitating, “Wait, you want me to do what?” but often my initial excitement to hear God speak directly to me carries me through to at least plant the seeds that He hands me. What I find hard to believe sometimes is that when I plant those seeds, the Lord will provide rain to water it. I usually have my watering can handy just in case. Unfortunately, it seems like the two things God calls me most often to do are generally my least favorite things to do: listening and waiting. I’ve heard it said that it is how we go about waiting that tells the most about our faith. Jesus calls us to trust Him, even when we can’t quite see his angle. Once we do the Lord’s work and plant a seed, we can never control when or how we see results – we release the proverbial reigns. For a control freak like me, that’s infuriating. But Jesus calls me into relationship with Him and into the deepest level of trust I can possibly muster. He calls us to take chances doing what the Lord requires of us. But sometimes what’s required of us is that we wait. The challenge is to ditch the watering can and wait for the rain.

Alec Beeve is a junior at SLU studying biomedical engineering.