There's an expression that if you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans. The implication, of course, is that God is amused by our insistence on doing what we want to instead of what He wants. When I reflect on my own 20 year journey through life, I find that it is I, not God, who is laughing. I laugh not to scoff God or to attempt in any way to discredit Him. I laugh out of pure joy and sheer awe that my God is so indescribably brilliant that he could bring me- despite the numerous stops, starts and u-turns along the way- to where I am today.
I laugh because I was born 13 years after my youngest sibling, when my mother was 36 years old. God placed me in my mother's womb because He knew she would accept this child with tenderness and affection. Born a month premature and spending my first days in the ICU with pneumonia, I relied on that unconditional love that only a mother's love can provide. That love has only grown stronger in the intervening years.
I laugh because of my mother's surgery when I was 9. Afraid that they would find cancer, she grew closer to our Lord in those preceding months to ask that she be saved. When she left the hospital cancer-free, she had been transformed. Soon after, she transformed my family from occasional Catholics to regular Sunday worshipers, fostering my fledgeling faith.
I laugh because 2 years later God decided to take my father out of the World just as unexpectedly as he placed me in it. Yet, through those darkest days, God planted new seeds of faith in me that were to grow amidst the ashes. My father's death allowed my mother and my brother to change course and make the decision that it was important enough to invest in a Catholic high school education rather than the capable public school in town. What I saw then as simply an opportunity to follow my friends from elementary school to high school I see now as God's guiding hand directing me. For my best friends back in Buffalo today are ones I never would have met, my interest in International Affairs would never have been ignited had it not been for a high school trip to London and my faith would never have been strengthened if I did not have the opportunity to serve as Rector for my school's Kairos retreat. All this and so much more simply would not have happened had my father been present. I do not say this to lessen his significance in my life but rather to thank him. I pray for his soul daily, knowing that he thanks God for allowing me to live a more fruitful life, perhaps in his absence but most definitely in his honor.
Lastly, I laugh because, in a time of spiritual dryness when I felt more separated from God then I ever had before, He sent me to a secular university in a town full of atheists to become a witness to His infinite mercy and the redemptive power of his Son. Looking back, nowhere in my college decision-making process did my faith play a factor. I compartmentalized, like so many chose to do in our day and age, my faith into a tiny box I would unpack for an hour on Sunday and then store away until the next week. But God waited, like the father of the Prodigal Son, for me to come home. And when I did arrive back at his front gate earlier this semester seeking forgiveness, He ran to His son, threw His arms around him, and kissed him. (Luke 15:20)
I think the trouble many find in their belief in God is that he operates in such a way that is so foreign to how we are taught to conceptualize the World. From a young age, we are taught that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Thus, we seek to smooth out the edges in everything. Our architecture- doorways, skyscrapers, etc.- are straight. Our educational system is rigid. We equate moving up in our jobs as "climbing the ladder."
When we look to nature, however, we see God doesn't think like we do. There are rolling hills and jagged mountains, beautiful seashells and squiggly plants. God is concerned with purpose and beauty, not necessarily speed and efficiency. After all, what is time and effort to an infinite being!?
So too, then, does God draw the paths of our lives in squiggles. I, like so many, often find this frustrating, almost unbearably so at times. Yet I am heartened by the words of the hymn "Be Not Afraid": Be not afraid, I go before you always, come follow me, and I will give you rest.
Someone once put it to me this way. When a symphony performs a piece of music, it knows that its end goal is to reach the final note of that song. But what matters to the symphony is the journey to that last note. That is to say, that the song is not one single end note. Rather, the beauty lies in the complexities of the entire piece from beginning to end.
Our lives work the same way. We know our end goal is to reach our final and eternal note: heaven. And while we should live our lives with the end note in mind, we should not seek to reach it before its appointed time. We trust in God, assured that he has written us a beautiful score and has provided us with all the instruments needed to play it gloriously in His name. It's a song that is tailored specifically for us. Nobody in the entire history of the Universe- past, present, or future- could play my song as precisely as me your song as perfectly as you. And while we all wish at times that the song was a little more direct, and perhaps a little more mellow, we can be certain that once we do reach that final note after years spent performing dutifully, our audience, our Lord, will stand and applaud us, saying "Bravo! Well done! Come recline with me in heaven, where we shall listen to the angels play without end." Alleluia!
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