Anabelle and I shall be completing six years of stay in the US within the coming months. All those years, I have been not been productive. I have not had a job. I have not been creating wealth. I have not been contributing nor making a difference in the way I have been used to in the past. I could very well be a non-entity and the world goes on as it does and will.
And yet, they have been good and happy years. We have seen Jonathan and Jane grow up and we have been a big part in their early years. We have seen Macky through medical school and just recently gave him and Lani a pretty lavish wedding. We have seen and been to awesome places, thanks to Martin and Mickey for the most part. We have taken up hiking and walked through some of the most beautiful places in our part of the world. We have met and made new friends; and those whom we already had, we have deepened our friendship with them even more. We have helped in all those years in the the work of evangelization in our parish. And I believe both Anabelle and I have become more deeply spiritual.
Compared to our busy-ness before, we are indeed doing ‘nothing.’ I feel we have cocooned ourselves in a relatively easy life and that is getting me rather restless. Will I eventually emerge from my present cocoon to do something else? I hope it is not yet emerging into eternal life. Bit if it were so, it would have been a full and fulfilled life I have had. Yet, there is this lingering feeling within me that the best is yet to come. Not in the next life. But in the here and now. My God is the God of surprises. I have never imagined myself living in the US and yet here I am, truly enjoying it. My God is the God of the improbable and the impossible. If someone in my youth had told me what I would become in my future, I would definitely have said, “Impossible!” Yet, the impossible has happened and is stilling happening in my life. My God is the God of the unexpected. I never expected this turn in my life – doing nothing but helping raise my two grandchildren. And yet, there is this incessant voice and persistent feeling that I am being prepared for something else. I stay. I pray. And I wait.
Today is the feast of the conversion of St. Paul. On the road to Damascus, he encountered this God of surprises, this God of the improbable and the impossible, this God of the totally unexpected. From being the most rabid persecutors of the those who belonged to the Way, he became the fervent of all the apostles in proclaiming and spreading the Good News. A totally unexpected turn for him. And I am sure St. Paul would have been the first to say, “Impossible! This cannot be happening to me.”
“Lord, you have peppered my life with surprises, with the improbable, the impossible and the unexpected. Stay with me as I wait in faith and confidence in what you have in store for me – that it only gets better from here on.”
Jesus appeared to the Eleven and said to them:
“Go into the whole world
and proclaim the Gospel to every creature.”
Mark 16:15