What Are You Putting in His Way?

June 13th, 2008
1 Kings 19:9,11-16 / Mt 5:27-32

It’s hard to imagine a worse nightmare than finding oneself in the middle of a vast desert with neither food nor water. The hours pass and then the days, and we rapidly grow weaker and more desperate. There seems no escape and the end seems very near.
Many of the greatest saints have told us about this experience in their own spiritual lives. They were quite safe in their convents and monasteries, but the “desert” overwhelmed their souls and they felt abandoned by God and by everyone else as well. The pain was overwhelming because they’d put all their trust in the Lord - and he seemed to be gone.

But he wasn’t. He was there all the while; they just didn’t know where to look. He was there, as we hear in today’s Old Testament reading, in the quiet whispering of the breeze, waiting for them to strip away whatever it was in their lives that was in the way of their being at one with him. The Lord didn’t walk away from them. It was they and we who have other preoccupations and other agenda that block him out.

The Lord will never abandon you. Count on that. So if you’re feeling desperate, abandoned, and alone, don’t complain to the Lord, look at what you’ve put in his way!

by Monsignor Dennis Clark, Ph.D.