Wednesday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Today was an unhappy day. I woke up, started on emails for work. Then the lawnmower would not start, so had to wrestle with that. When I got back inside, I realized that all the emails I had sent had bounced back. I tried to send them again and again but they all bounced back. Later I tried to run an errand for work, only to have a tire blowout. I skipped the errand and went home defeated thinking this is a Murphy’s Law kind of day. Murphy’s Law being that anything that can go wrong will. With this litany of complaints on the front of my brain, I sat down to work on the reflection for today.
It startled me then when today’s first reading was about the Israelites whining. It’s sobering when scriptures confront you directly. Does God really want us to be whiners? When bad things happen, does God cause them to happen in order to punish us? Or does God allow bad things to happen as part of process of recreating us? Through these circumstances we are being called to awareness of a need for the Lord.
In today’s gospel, Jesus shares a parable about the “Sower and the Seed.” In this story, the seed is the word of God. Instead, imagine the seed is really each of us. If we are the seed, then the ground represented in the story is the variety of situations in which we find ourselves. Sometimes the ground is our choice. Other times, the ground is what God has allowed us to enter. The difference is not so much the diversity of the situations, but in our ability to grow and bear fruit in each type of soil. When we find ourselves in rocky soil, do we complain and say it is too rocky I can’t grow here? When we feel the weeds of life are choking the very life out of us, does our whining get rid of the weeds?
Reflect today not on life’s circumstances but on how you are reacting to the less than ideal situations in your life. In every circumstance the Lord is providing what you need to grow and bear fruit. For us, the challenge is to recognize the abundance of the Lord’s provision.
"Lord, help us to remember you are with us always in every situation. Give us ears that hear our own complaining as a call to take a step back or a deep breath. Grant that through these times we would have the ability to see the big picture as you do; so that we might know that every setback or obstacle is an opportunity for our lives to bear good fruit"
-Michael Montgomery