Learn

God is not emotional in His love for us.  He is rational. 

Though Your Sins be as Scarlet (Greg Collins)

It is easy to become overwhelmed.  Sometimes I have encountered various jobs to do in my life and thought to myself that such things were simply so massive that even considering the undertaking was completely overwhelming.  When I try to approach the problem from the beginning I become completely overwhelmed, but upon reflection it can become a much more interesting thing to consider all the various steps that go towards getting a ting completed.

One of the most valuable things that I have learned over time is that a person does not need to know every single step to make in order to get to the end f the road, they must simply understand the first step and then the second and so on and so forth until they make all the necessary steps to get to the end of the journey.

Sometimes I have found myself looking back on a task after a considerable amount of time and thinking to myself that I did an awful lot of worrying prior to getting everything sorted only to find that all is well that ends well – so to speak!

I have been reflecting on this today, because the one thing that comes out of every experience like this is that there were learnings along the way.  And those learnings make a very big difference in the way that I would tackle a problem in the future.  And I have been reflecting on how it is that as I learn new things I can apply them to future scenarios so that a thing that seemed really difficult to me in the beginning now seems like the easiest thing in the world. 

And it occurs to me that God Himself asks me to continue to learn so that I can constantly become better and stronger in helping others to reach Heaven.  Saint Josemaria wrote in “The Forge”, “When you are with someone, you have to see a soul: a soul who has to be helped, who has to be understood, with whom you have to live in harmony, and who has to be saved.”

This is a sort of learned charity.  In learning to focus on others we learn to understand a broader expression of God’s love for us.  In the beginning we might think that such a task is too great an undertaking at the beginning of my journey, after some discipline and practice – for after all, love is an act of will not an emotion – the whole process seems to come more easily to us.

These days it is quite a popular notion to think of love as something that is emotional.  We feel love for someone and therefore make decisions about how to act with and around them.  But this is not the sort of love that God speaks of.  God is not emotional in His love for us.  He is rational.  God’s love is a decision to love His creatures no matter how much we sin and sadden or anger Him.  God’s love does not change as emotions change over time.

And this is what I need to learn in this lifetime – the ability to love without changing and to please my God…

For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.