God meets us where we are and invites us to meet Him where He is! In the stormy circumstances of our lives, when we are gripped with fear and doubts, God enters into the place where we are physically and spiritually, and invites us to meet Him where He is, as Jesus did with Peter in today’s gospel.
At the age of four, I knew that God was everywhere. I spoke to Him.
But as I grew toward manhood, the more I learned, the less I believed in God. When I was twenty-one, my superior intellect told me that God was a fake. Heaven could not be "up," and hell could not be "down" because, in space, there is not up or down. And I knew that everything in creation dies, including the smallest insect and the biggest star.
The following words were written by Jim Bishop, the author of many best-selling biographies and histories.
Then one day I felt a new experience. I saw the miracle of birth — Virginia Lee, a child of my own — and it turned my wandering mind around. I began to doubt my doubts. Gradually I lost faith in my intellect. It was not supplying the needed answers.
I could not see the air, but without it, I would die. Thus, it is, I decided, with the spirit of man. I needed something to breathe life into a soul that had been crushed by the dominance of the human mind.
I was a slow learner, but, somehow, somewhere, as I groped my painful way, I found my soul ... I knew it was there — wounded, bleeding perhaps, but alive.
I began to pray, and as faith returned to me, I feared that it might dissolve again. So, I prayed for continuing faith.
It was only when I gave up — when I let go and allowed myself to be carried by God — that I began to really feel His Presence. He was there, and I knew it!
I had wanted proof — something for my eyes or ears or hands. He wanted me to believe without it. Faith and trust are what He required of me! And He never rested till I found them (Bishop, J., "Journey to Faith" adapted).
Like Peter and Bishop, we too can have the experience of God meeting us where we are.
The God who loves us so much that He will show up; He will meet us where we are to bring us wholeness of life. And if we want to grow into the kind of beautifully fulfilled persons God created us to be, we have to trust Him unconditionally and give up on the notion that we are in control of events – meet Him where He is and give up on the idea that we are in charge – and pray for continuing faith and give up on the idea that we can do it our way instead of God's way.
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.jpg "Father Pinto Paul, C.S.C.")