Tuesday, September 29, 2015

A Thought from Garrett

St. Alban’s discernment candidate, Garrett Boyte, shared this with me from his journal…

“This is a thought I've been mulling over for a while and today it became concrete for me.
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Earlier today I was helping a friend of a friend. This young woman had a massive four poster King size bed made of real wood. I had already moved the bed from her mother's house to her new house, and I had started the two hour process of putting this behemoth together.

My friend's friend is a single mother with a young daughter. Of course, I was happy to help. I've always had a penchant for single mothers because I believe it takes a great deal of strength to do what they do.

Anyways, here I am putting together this massive bed by myself. I'm listening to a little Christian music, and I figured I'd take this time to mediate on our Lord.

I begin to think on the Kingdom of God. Saint Paul said that no work done in the name of God is in vain. God uses everything. I caught myself thinking about what God would do with this work I was doing.

That's the beautiful thing about the Kingdom of God. Everything gets used. Everything. Even, or perhaps especially, the mundane little things that seem to inundate our lives.

Let me say how much I hate meticulous work. I loathe the fine details of anything. You won't find anything in my life that is over organized or sorted. If there's no necessary reason for it, I have a hard time enjoying it. But guess what: God uses those things too.

And maybe that was a profound moment for me. Even these little mundane things, like sorting shirts by color for Goodwill, gets used by God in the building of His Kingdom. I hate mundanity, but God uses everything. Nothing gets wasted.So there I am sitting in the floor, sweating, turning a bolt with my fingers for the fiftieth time that day when it hits me: God will use this.

I've had epiphanies before. This was one of them. I just sat there dumbfounded for a moment. God uses everything. The BIG and the small. The success and failure. The good and the bad. The whole and the broken. He uses it all.

Even these little things, like helping a single mother move, would be used by God. How? I have no idea. But God doesn't throw anything away.

And truth be told, that's amazing. Maybe I'm still trying to accept that God can (or would) use someone as flawed and broken as me. Maybe I'm still trying to learn what that means. Love knows for now, and that's good enough for me. And maybe that's the thing. That the creator of all things would use some of those things to help restore all those things is amazing. That we, broken men and women, get to participate in his mission is incredible in every sense of the word."