There is a
story told of a terrible flood which left most of a village under
water. One man who lived in the village was a devout Christian
and he prayed to God and said, ‘Lord I know you will rescue me and
not let me die in this flood.’ He was in the upstairs of his
house when a boat came along and the rescue team told him to jump in. But he
said, ‘No, the Lord is going to save me, I know it’. And
he couldn’t be convinced otherwise. After a few more hours
the water had risen higher and by now he was on the roof. Then
a bigger boat came along and they shouted to him to climb
aboard, but he said ‘No, I know that the Lord is going to rescue
me.’ Try as they might, they couldn’t convince him to get
into the boat. Eventually when he was at the very top of the
roof and the water was almost up to him a helicopter came along and
they lowered a rope for him to grab. But he refused and shouted
up to them that there was no need as God was going to rescue him, he
was quite sure of it. Shortly after, the man drowned as he was
washed away by the flood.
When he came before God in heaven,
he said, ‘Lord, I had such faith in you. Why didn’t you rescue
me?’ The Lord said to him, ‘I sent you two boats and a
helicopter; what more do you want?!’
Sometimes I
hear people complain that the Christian life is too hard, or
unrealistic, not with the times. ‘How can God expect us to
live this way?’ The truth is that God doesn’t
expect us to live it on our own without his help, but often the help
that He gives us is a bit like the story of the flood, not quite as
dramatic as we would like it to be. We would like God to appear
to us and explain things to us personally. And when we pray, we
would like to be in ecstasy all the time, enjoying visions of
heavenly things. Sometimes when I pray with people I would love
to see them healed instantly. But faith isn’t like that.
It tends to be much more down to earth. And a lot of the extraordinary
things that God does for us are hidden in the apparently ordinary.
God speaks to
me all the time; He really does. He gives me direction
and encouragement. But He doesn’t appear to me and I don’t
hear a voice. He speaks to me mostly through other
people, through nature and often through something I will read in the Bible.
The Lord comes to
us in the mass, in a very real way. In the Eucharist He is
really and truly present so that we can receive him. All we can
see is what looks like bread, but Jesus is there. He grants us
his forgiveness through confession, so that we can live in peace and
not be dragging the past around with us. These things might not
be as spectacular as we’d like them to be, but God is most
certainly there. So why does He always remain so
hidden and come to us in such apparently ordinary ways? The reason is that if God appeared to us in a dramatic form we wouldn’t need to
have any faith, but faith is important, so God remains
hidden so that our faith will continue to grow.
Advent is time of preparing
for the coming of Jesus at Christmas and also for when He will come
again in glory. Perhaps part of that getting ready for him is
to recognise what God has already given us. It is there for us
to use and make use of. We don’t want to be like the man in
the flood and end up saying when we die, ‘Lord, why didn’t
you help us as you promised you would?’ Maybe He will say, ‘I
gave you all the help you needed. I gave you my body and blood
to feed you, in the mass. I gave you forgiveness through the
priests. I gave you guidance through the teaching of my Church. I gave you my own words in the Scriptures.’
May
Advent be for us a time of rediscovering what God has given us.
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