“O infinite Goodness, You chose us to be Your creatures even before You gave us being; therefore, You could well say, ‘You have not chosen Me, for since you are nothing, you had no power to choose, but I have chosen you.’  You chose to make us Your creatures and to create us to Your own image and likeness, moved by Your goodness alone.  You chose us again at our Baptism, and made us Your children,  while we, born in sin, could never have hoped to be Your children if You had not chosen us.”(St. Mary Magdalen dei Pazzi)

As a child, I was completely certain that God loved me very much.   I sensed that I had been blessed in ways that many others had not been blessed and reasoned it had to be His gift to me. I also realized that I lacked gifts that others seemed to have but it didn’t bother me because, fundamentally, I was His girl.

And then I forgot.

Despite a powerful conversion and encounter with the Trinitarian God I carried these anti-Providential thoughts under the guise of humility for a long time. But then I spent some time with Karol.

A few years ago I had the great opportunity to lead my middle-school students in a study of the book “John Paul the Great: His Five Loves” by Jason Evert.  I loved Pope John Paul II to begin with.  Even when I strayed from my faith I viewed JPII as a giant of intellect, charisma, and most of all, astounding courage.  Since my return, I am even more astounded by the saint’s incomparable faith, prayer life and complete, trust-filled surrender to God’s will.  Jason Evert’s book captures this dimension masterfully and accessibly.

Young Karol Wojtyla, born shortly after the end of the First World War, lost his mother and then his only brother at a young age.  The boy who would become Pope John Paul II was raised in impoverished Poland by a devout, loving, generous father.  Karol excelled in academics, the arts, and athletics. He was a naturally gifted young man with a heart burning with compassion and love.  The Nazis invaded his homeland and turned everyone’s world upside-down. All around him was death and destruction.  Beautiful people whom he loved were recklessly slaughtered.  During this time his only remaining family — his beloved father — died of heart failure.  Karol spent the rest of the war doing manual labour in a quarry and studying secretly.

One day on his way home from working in the quarry  Karol was hit by a German truck. Instead of being left for dead in the street as would have been the norm – so lowly-esteemed were the lives of the Polish by their invaders – the soldiers actually saw that he got to hospital.  As Karol convalesced he took this brush with death and his deliverance as a confirmation of his priestly vocation.   He reasoned that if God had saved his life when so many around him had not been saved it must only have been because God must have a special plan for him.

When I read this conclusion it stood out as if it were written in glaring neon letters. And I did not know what to make of it.

I was baffled that someone could look at the suffering around him and think his life was saved for a purpose. Did he see himself as more important than the others? Was he saying that all those who had died were expendable?  None of this sat right with me, yet I couldn’t dismiss him.  Surely, the orphaned Karol Wojtyla knew first hand suffering and loss, surely his heart burned with love and compassion, and surely he was a man of great humility.  I could not question his ability to make this conclusion.  So I had to question myself.

His witness made me re-examine my own heart and opened up my eyes and my mind to a much greater understanding of Providence. He led me to ponder at length the degree of God’s involvement and concern for each of our temporal and eternal lives. What I learned and discerned astounded me and still causes me to marvel daily.

I had long been attempting to reconcile the abundance of good gifts that God had granted me with a world marked with so much suffering. How could so many more deserving people have so much less than I? But I was considering these temporal gifts and comforts as ends in themselves, rather than means to the true end.

But Jesus taught that “Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more.”

My dear friend and favourite theologian loves to remind us of the truth that any gift God gives us -any grace He grants us- is always, always, always for others.  Christianity is all about others. It’s all about putting others before ourselves, of pouring out our life for the life of the world, of making ourselves channels through which God can do His marvellous work, it’s about showing up each day, grateful to be called to be part of the Kingdom-building work crew.

We are gifted to give.
Loved to love.
Cared for to care.
Healed to heal.
Blessed to bless.

I have come to understand and to declare that yes, I am a very blessed woman. I have been given many great gifts in many arenas: in health, wealth, intelligence, community, citizenship, and more.   I see how all of these gifts certainly make my life easier and enjoyable and I truly thank God for these gifts, but more than that I see how wonderful it is that God has given me so many ways to share His love with others through the unique combination of providential circumstances that He has given to me alone. What dignity He gives me to have entrusted me with a unique ‘skill set’ by which I can love others.   All of the duties that He places in my life are purely gifts waiting to be given, gifts for the recipient but also gifts for me, for as they pass through me they fill me with His life and His presence.

I have come to affirm without hesitation that the greatest of all gifts He has given me are two gifts that are not constrained by physical limitations, nor dictated by DNA or accident of birth: He has given me the gift of being His beloved child! This is a gift that is offered to all of us! Deo gratias!  The second gift though is the gift of having been loved by others.  That too ought to be available to all.   Looking at sheer numbers, this should be the gift that is easier to attain, but I think that sadly this is the less certain one, the one people are at greater risk of not attaining because it’s been left in the hands of each of us to see that it is given.  Christians, take note: let none of us pass up on an opportunity to love another, let none of us be found to have let another soul reach the end of their life having never known the feeling of having been cherished by somebody.

Mother Teresa spoke often of the greatest poverty being the poverty of loneliness, of not being loved. This is the poverty that can run rampant in the midst of affluence.   She saw starkly too how blind we are to the torrent of gifts we receive from God – both the natural gifts of life: our every breath; that the sun’s power is reigned in and converted for our use by the marvel that is the photosynthetic machinery of humble plant cells; the harvest of food that feeds our world; and the supernatural gifts of His life in our souls and of love.  Sadly, we have convinced ourselves in our technocratic towers of Babel that we no longer need the love of God, and we have forgotten to love others.  Lord have mercy on us!

Little Jennifer was partly right: what we’ve been given is not a measure of our worth. Though it is certainly an indication that we have been invited and enlisted to do much for Him. But what is also true, and what I had erroneously rejected, is that what we’ve been given has indeed been given, and God is a good gift giver.

The  measure of our worth is solely that we are His and are made in His image.  He is so close to us, He is whispering to us in our every moment, inviting us to open up to let Him show us the picture He wants us to paint with the unique palette He’s given each one of us.   Like Mother Teresa, let us accept with great joy that we are His pencil…or piece of chalk or calligraphy pen or can of spray paint. Maybe our handwriting is impeccable or maybe our lead is broken or dull. Maybe our words jump off the page or maybe our ink just blots and smudges, but let us consent to writing the story of His great love with our lives with every tool he has given us!

 Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God!