REFECTION from SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT  

There is a saying that has appeared on a number of posters. It goes like this:“Please be patient; God isn’t finished with me yet.” I think this is a good motto for Lent. Our culture assumes that our growth and our education are about finished by the time we have survived the trials of adolescence. Then, once we’re in our twenties, it is expected that we have begun to figure life out and act like adults. Even though this assumes that life becomes easier, it certainly isn’t God’s view of things. We are never completed products. We are living beings and our growth and change is essential to staying alive.  Abram was an old man when God called him to pull up roots, move to a new land and start a new family. That was long past adolescence, and he had plenty of time to  form opinions on every aspect of life.  He was probably very comfortable with his way of life; but God called him to change radically—his view of himself and even his image of God.

Where would we be if Abram had insisted he was too old to change?

Most of the apostles were over twenty years old when Jesus told them to drop everything and come follow him. They had jobs, families and lives they always had known. Then Jesus comes along and calls them to a radically different life and a radically different way of understanding their world and their God. Jesus showed Peter, James, and John a destination, an end-point to this life of change and growth on a mountain top. This was sharing in the glory of the resurrection. Only when we have been raised from the dead with Christ, we will share fully in his glory and we may call ourselves finished, complete.

Saint Paul says the Lord Jesus Christ “will give a new form to this lowly body of ours and remake it according to the pattern of his glorified body, by his power to subject everything to himself.” God isn’t finished with us yet. Holiness is God’s work.  Our task is to let God change us, to give God space and time in our lives, and to consent to the transformations God wants us to make. And then, when we recognize the grace of God at work in us, we are charged to tell others about the wonderful mercy of God. Tell others what God has done for us, what God means in our lives, what God has enabled us to do and become.

Sister Mary Jane Vigil, OSB