My God is an awesome God. He is also very counter-intuitive and always full of surprises. He likes to make the first last and the last first. He challenges His people to seek perfection by embracing the cross. And there is more. He makes the dead come alive again.
I have always had a soft spot in my heart for the poor, the oppressed, the disabled, the dispossessed, those in the fringes and in the peripheries. I have always strived to have a preferential option for the poor. I have always looked at them as occasions for me to be more loving, more giving and more generous. I have tried to share whatever I have with them. And whatever I know and have learned about the good news to them, I try to proclaim to them.
Now, my counter-intuitive God is challenging me to turn this paradigm upside down. In humility, I acknowledge that it is the poor and the underprivileged who often proclaim the good news to me in very real terms. They teach me joy even in the midst of their want and deprivation. They teach me authentic trust and dependence on God’s graces and not on any human interventions. They teach me how to hope even in the face of grinding poverty and endless corruption.
The little I do as service to the poor, the oppressed and suffering is small compared to the service that they do for me in return. Through their pain and suffering, they do me a service by helping keep my heart a heart of flesh and not a heart of stone. Through the little they have in life, I am able to have a little bit more for myself. Isn’t it but fair that I give back with them from whatever I have? When they bear their burdens, doesn’t that relieve some of mine? When I come forward to serve them, they have already taken several steps to serve me.
Yes, my God is an awesome God. He teaches me such counter-intuitive lessons in the most unexpected ways from the most surprising sources.
Blessed be the Lord, my Rock!
~Psalm 144
Jesus said to them,
“The children of this age marry and remarry;
but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age
and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage.
They can no longer die, for they are like angels;
and they are the children of God because they are the ones who will rise.
That the dead will rise even Moses made known in the passage about the bush,
when he called ‘Lord’ the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob;
and he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.”
Luke 20:34-38