It's God Calling…
This morning when I glanced at the first reading I didn’t of it much. In the Gospel, what captured me was: “The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few; so ask the master of the harvest to out laborers for his harvest.” Vocation automatically came to mind, an invitation. When I re-read the 1st reading, it came to me, “wrestling with God.”
The Gospel in a sense challenges us to respond to the master’s call. Are we one of the laborers sent out for his harvest? Jesus is moved with pity for the “troubled and abandoned” for they were “like sheep without a shepherd.” There probably isn’t a day in our lives where we don’t have the opportunity to step it up—to indeed look around us and look for the troubled and abandoned. We are challenged to respond.
God’s is always inviting us to respond. How much time do we spend wrestling with Him? Yet, wrestling with God may be a good thing. Something that allows us to reflect, to deepen our relationship with God and in the end, like Jacob, ask for God’s blessing. Wrestling with God may allow us to see him face to face in our prayer, in our relationships with others, in our response to his call. God knows that we may wrestle with him, but in the end, in our own openness, in our own faith, God will prevail. Much perseverance is needed.
I am currently reading Contemplative Prayer by Thomas Merton. I paraphrase a passage I ran across today.
There is a movement of meditation, expressing the basic paschal rhythm of the Christian life, the passage from death to life in Christ. Sometimes prayer, meditation, and contemplation [dare we say…wrestling] are “death”—a kind of descent into our own nothingness, a recognition of helplessness, frustration, infidelity, confusion, ignorance; a profound distress of man in his nothingness and his total need of God. Then, as we determine to face the hard realities of our inner life, as we recognize again that we need to pray hard and humbly for faith, he draws us out of darkness into light—he hears us, answers our prayers, recognizes our needs, and grants us the help we require—if only be giving us more faith to believe he can and will help us in his own time.
It’s comforting to know it is okay to wrestle with God. Again, with great perseverance and openness, God in his time will give us the courage to respond, for “the master of his harvest” will send out laborers.
