Tired

“And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done.  Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.” (Genesis 2:2-3).

God made the universe and everything in it.

He did not need to.  God is perfect and entire and complete in and of Himself.  He has no need to create things for His entertainment.  Rather, God can exist ad infinitum without having anything else around Him.  And yet – because God is perfect love – He wished to share that love with creatures.  It is for this reason that He created first the Angels and the spiritual realm and then later the physical world, including all structures, plants, creatures and beings on it.  He decided – through love – to create humans even knowing that we would fail.  He did it anyway, because He loves us and knows Himself and knows that through His love for us He would save us.  And He knows this whether ten people sin or fifty people sin or fifty billion people sin.  He knows this even if I were the only soul born and the only sinner – even for one as miserable as me, God would have suffered and died on that Cross for love.

When I stop to really reflect on that sort of love I am quite overcome,  You see, God does not get tired.  He does not get impatient.  He does not worry that next time will be better.  And still – even in his story of creation – He made time for rest. 

“And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done.  Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.” (Genesis 2:2-3).

That rest was for my tiredness – not God’s.  It would be like a mother walking at a toddler’s pace around the entire globe just so that the toddler could keep up with her.  We humans could never do such a thing because the delay and consequence of it would be unimaginable.  And yet, God who is infinitely more than us has created a space for us to be infinitely less than Him – because He loves us so much more perfectly than a mother does…

And not only this, but God Himself chose – when He entered time and space at the moment of the Immaculate Conception – to experience tiredness and fatigue in His own Precious Body.

This would be like me voluntarily choosing to allow myself to be taken to the level of an ant and to live in that reality without complaint because I love ants so much and want to show them that there is something better to aspire to than collecting crumbs for the rest of their lives…  But it is even more than that.  It is like being the ant and then being attacked and tortured and killed y the other ants because I was the very best ant that could ever be imagined and the ants wanted to kill that so that they would not have to face that perfection in their meaningless lives.

And in reflecting on that, I have been reflecting on the words of Saint Josemaria in “The Forge” at 290, when he said,

“He who is perfectus Deus, perfectus Homo — perfect God and perfect Man — and who enjoyed every happiness in Heaven, chose to experience fatigue and tiredness, tears and suffering... so that we might understand that if we are to be supernatural we must also be very human."

For that tiredness is perhaps the most underestimated gift of my Beloved to me…

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