What God Wants Us To Be

Jan 15

The Visitation Sisters gifted us all coffee mugs this year! They are identical and quote the passage from Esther 4:14, “Perhaps you were born for such a time as this.” This empowering quote is matched by the inspirational message on the other side, “The world needs who God made you to be.” Of course, I love this gift as Francis de Sales picks up on this same message when he writes, “Let us be what God wants us to be...Even if we were the most perfect creatures under heaven, what good would that do us if we were not as God’s will would have us be?”

I find humor in that we all have identical mugs that express the uniqueness of God’s creation of us. Even this morning I put my mug down next to Fr. Ron’s, and I could not tell whose was whose! When the mugs were stacked next to one another, they were indistinguishable. Indistinguishable mugs used by distinguishable men. How can one not smile at that?

As I preview this new season of Ordinary Time and the upcoming year, months, and days, I admit that I just stack them next to one another. Similar to the mugs, days become indistinguishable. Weeks and months, I cannot tell them apart. Our founder, Blessed Louis Brisson warns about this happening in our ministry. It is a spiritual trap when our moments become “just another.” Just another Mass. Just another funeral. Just another class. Just another day. Just another DeSales Weekly article… It becomes hard to believe the mugs. Were we born for “such a time as this?”

While I was writing this reflection, my close friend just became the grandmother of a new baby girl. The infant was named after her grandmother. Immediately after the birth, my friend sent me this text, “It is going to take a while for me to find the words. This experience was life changing!” The thing is… she is a mother of five and this is her fifth grandchild. Her awe, wonder, and amazement with the birth of her fifth grandchild shattered my routine of “just another.”

Paul uses similar imagery of childbirth when writing about all of creation and us, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit” (Romans 8:22-23). God continues to do something new in our universe, world, and lives. “Just another” is a myth. There is something new here, and God has not finished creating. I think the Book of Esther was right, “Perhaps you were born for such a time as this.”

May God be praised.