I love the bit in this morning's reading when St. Francis suddenly saw the whole world in God's hands, and wondered why God didn't drop it. What a thought - God just dropping the world! I imagine there are times God would like to do just that; we human beings do manage to screw things up so badly sometimes that I wonder if God wouldn't like to say, "you've had chance after chance and I'm fed up with the lot of you," and then just drop the world into oblivion. Poof!
Well, God doesn't work that way. God loves this world, warts and all, and doesn't give up on it, or on us, God's frail and faltering people. God craves intimacy with us, the kind of intimacy he shared with Jesus; and God, like the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son, waits patiently for us to enter into that intimacy. God watches for us as we journey on that road to intimacy, as we come to know that everything, everything comes from God, and that the greatest of these things is love and closeness, whether in times of sorrow or in times of joy. Through silence and prayer we can learn to weld this knowledge into our hearts. Through service to our fellow human beings we can learn to feel this in our bones.
God won't drop this world; God loves it too much. Perhaps as I write this God is rejoicing in the snow that is falling here in New England. We may not be rejoicing a whole lot as the snowplows block off our driveways yet again, but we can also say to ourselves, "boy this snow is beautiful. So beautiful."
Audrey
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