CatholicSoup is a religious-run blog designed to provide Catholic insight through personal experience.

Thursday, January 11, 2018

Emmanuel: the Entrance into Inadequacy

We are now a little over a week into the new year. What comes with that are new goals, new strivings and resolutions. Perhaps new jobs, new territories in our lives and careers, even new relationships. Energy levels are high, we might feel motivated to begin the trek toward those goals or excitement to start the new year, excitement to start the day. However, we all know that at some point, the honeymoon ends. Hopefully it’s not on January 1st, but there does come a time when those feelings of excitement, motivation and confidence diminish and we’re left with sadness, discouragement, lack of initiative, depression, Inadequacy and self-doubt. What these negative feelings do is prevent us from true encounter with the living God, who has come as a baby, to save the world. 

 I recently wrote a reflection during the Christmas season that I believe can give us hope and help even in the Ordinary Time that follows after Christmas. 

During the Christmas season especially, if your a student your getting ready for finals week, mothers are doing shopping and preparing for guests, cleaning the house. Fathers are working, trying to make just a few extra bucks. All of this can be very exhausting and in a sense, it can allow us to discover our own limits very quickly. All of a sudden we realize that there are some things we just can’t do on our own. What do we do at this point?

 As a student in formation and full-time studies, it didn’t take long before I realized my own limitations. I reached a stand-still moment where I felt like I had done everything I could do, I had used up all of my energy, all my strength and still, it was not enough.  Tired and burned from all the work I had done, it was still not enough. My prayer was not good, and my academics weren’t either. I was missing the mark, despite all the work I was putting in, I felt like everything about myself was a fraud. What I felt were feelings of inadequacy, I felt insufficient, weak and disappointed in myself. 

But I later found out that what those feelings brought me was a realization of how much I need help, namely, from God. By reflecting on my own need, I was able to see our human nature as a whole, always needing help from the One who has held us in His hands since the very beginning. Without that divine assistance, our lives will always remain faulty, deficient and incomplete because what we really long for is that intimate reunion with God, whose nature is to Love. As much as we want to do things on our own, we soon will realize that we can only get so far. We need God and He wants us to allow Him into our lives just like He did at Bethlehem. You and I are not perfect beings, and as much as we try to be perfect we will always miss that mark, it’s in our nature. Sin literally means to “miss the mark.” That is not to say that we shouldn’t strive for that mark, or perfection, but to desire perfection. Matthew tells us at the end of Chapter 5, “Be perfect, just as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matt 5:48) 

What that requires is a prayer that comes from each of our hearts. The one that comes to Jesus in the crib, with full admittance of our weakness and our shortcomings, ready for healing, and with enough humility say to Him, “God, I can’t but You Can.” That’s the message of the Incarnation at Christmas. That our God who knows and understands our sinful nature, has humbled Himself so that He be born into our insufficient, weak and miss-the-mark humanity in order to live with us, and breathe with us. We have a God who enters into our brokenness and walks with us. In His birth, God gives us a message that I found to be very comforting for me in my studies, and I was able understand Christmas in a completely new way. 

God speaks to us in His birth and says, “I know you are inadequate, I know you are weak and hurting, but so am I, and I am with you now.”

I think at the heart of this is recognizing that we each need a Savior, one who leads us, redeems us and points us to every good thing that our souls can ever want. That means Himself in which we are perfected, His presence and His love in which we are fulfilled. What we need in this ordinary time is still the reminder of Christmas, that the Emmanuel God who comes down to be with us even at our weakest, darkest state, not only comes to be with us, but comes to live among us in the form of a man. That is a relational God, who wants nothing more than for us to be close to Him, even in those times we feel we are not enough. It’s in those times that God is able to say to us,  “You are enough, because I am enough.”

“We have a Savior and we have a compassionate God, who does not make everything perfect with some magic wand, but instead He comes to us and says I am here, and I will suffer with you, I will hurt with you, I will cry with you and endure with you.-Fr. Chris Gama OFM Cap


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