Each time I prayed today's scriptures, the word 'delight' stood out. It's from the Responsorial Psalm: "The Lord takes delight in His People." Do you know how much God delights in you? This June I will have been ordained for 40 years. Through all those years of ministering to God's people - teaching, preaching, counseling and giving retreats all over the country - one thing stands out. People simply do not believe how loved they are by their God. God's interventions in human history throughout the Old Testament and Jesus' 3 years of public ministry in the New Testament all point to God's incredible affection and love for us. Yet we struggle to believe this. Why??? Perhaps many feel that the Good News is simply too good to be true. Maybe this inability to accept God's unconditional love leads to our personal and national restlessness - and a search for acceptance and peace in a hundred other places. The proliferation of self-help books in our country in the past twenty years has escalated beyond belief. Yet the human family continues to search for meaning 'out there.' There is a beautiful legend of the musk deer that I feel applies here. The story states that when the musk deer arrives at puberty there is a glandular release of the most beautiful and intoxicating fragrance known to humans. The deer then begins a relentless pursuit of the source of that fragrance until its racing results in death from a heart attack or, in desperation, it leaps to its death off of a cliff. The tragedy is that it never knew that the source of that beauty was within. How like us! We are a blend of dust and divinity. I don't think we can grasp the full meaning of that without the Spirit's help in prayer. My mother used to say to me, "You would have to be in my heart to know how much I love you." With Jesus this is possible. His heart was opened on Calvary and remains open to us. Each day as we pray to accept this truth, may the Holy Spirit bring us to a deeper awakening of our God's affection for us. One of the greatest compliments in Scripture occurs in John's Gospel. In the early part of the Gospel Jesus says, "I am the Light of the World." Towards the end, Jesus passes the torch and proclaims, "You are the Light of the World." Celebrate that truth today, for you truly are 'de-light' of God's heart. |