It is in testing that I find the very truth of God's Essence within my life.

It is in testing that I find the very truth of God’s Essence within my life.

As each day confronts my ability to stand tall with a hope towards reaching the Will of God in my life the appearance of doubt makes its way into my mind. Now we know from the story of Job how he stood solid in spite of all the disasters Satan handed him.  Sometimes these same types of failures may become synonymous with you and I.  

Living with other people can easily confront our common sense of tolerance, or find ways of ignoring the proper manner to accept anyone who seems to be at odds with everything we attempt to accomplish.  

Suppose we might find ourselves on an island by chance and realize there are not those who got under our skin earlier in our struggle to avoid confrontation.  The end result will be no different.  We cannot escape problems or what we identify as crosses in our daily walk towards God’s promise of everlasting glory.  Difficulties in our life will always follow us.

The real awakening scenario each of us experiences is what appears as punishment for the fall of our parents in Genesis is not an evil existence as a human.  The everlasting love God promised to share with us is his way of bringing eternal forgiveness for our avoidance of mercy we can’t understand.  

Listen to the words God expressed between the very persons of the Trinity with regards to human beings;  “Then God said:  Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”  (Gn 1: 26).  If God didn’t care for his creation, beginning with the human species, he would have destroyed these creatures before they walked in the garden following their rejection of the fruit that was forbidden to eat.  

Many times we will find ourselves in a self-made thought that choosing to abstain from all earthly treasures and work as hermits without physical attachments we will find holiness.  A story I once told in an earlier article was about a man who joined an order of hermits.  He was told he could have nothing he called his own.  One day, while tilling the soil bare-handed he came upon an old tin cup buried in the dirt.  Because the temperature daily was hot and very humid, the only way to drink from the stream that flowed was by placing his hand in the water and trying to get some to his mouth.  Upon finding this old tin cup he felt God allowed him to satisfy his thirst as often and as much he desired.  When a fellow hermit saw this he asked the first hermit to allow him the use of the old tin cup that he too could satisfy his thirst.  The hermit who discovered the cup said no!  God meant it for him alone.  Because of his selfish attitude he lost his soul forbidding another person to share what God provided.  

No man is an island, as the words of this ethical description of life’s foreboding truth spells out.  There are times when becoming a loner will allow us to enter the world of contemplation where just you and God become one.  It is when we decide that connection to other souls can destroy the very reason that all of us are one at least spiritually.  If Jesus had chosen his apostles to remain isolated from reaching others, we would not be reading this or writing our own blogs.  Christianity would not have become real and each of us would still be in our sin.  

We are not alone now or will be alone in heaven.  Each of us was created for God, and finds this element of humanity by completeness and compassion towards one another.

Praying alone without even one other person might allow us to imagine that this is the only manner to reach God.  Jesus said:  “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.”  (Mt 18: 20).  

During our judgment by Christ the question will not be how many times we were in Church, or rararies we recited.  “What did you do for one another?” How we treat our fellow brothers or sisters will go a long way to eternal life.  They are the very ones with whom we shall exist!

Ralph B. Hathaway