Letter

I received an email today – an email I’d been both anticipating and dreading. I was 95% sure I was going to be accepted into the upcoming Deaconate formation class but you never really know until you know. Why so sure? Well, since I’ve been discerning it for the past 9 months, it has always seemed – right.  That’s not to say that my interior faith life has been incredible. No, I’d call that maybe a little above average and in need of  vast improvement.  But if there are two things about me that I have no doubts, they are that a) I think that Christ is the answer to the world’s problems and b) I have a servant’s heart.  So I think those make the journey to becoming a Deacon of the Catholic Church a really good fit for me.

Okay then, so why the dread? Because it’s … well it’s a big deal. I have my comfortable life that I’m all nestled into, safe and secure. I don’t have a lot of people looking to me for any kind of leadership and that’s a really safe space for me.  The journey of this deaconate formation is one I’m really looking forward to, but it’s the destination that sorta scares the daylight out of me!

But, as living creatures surrounded by other living creatures, we are constantly changing. You aren’t exactly the same person right now that you were when you started reading this post, and I’m not the same as I was when I started writing it. So as we change, it’s vital we are committed to moving forward, to getting better. Because if we are changing but not changing for the better, it follows that we are changing for the worse.  Just like muscles, if we are not getting stronger then we are getting weaker.   To stand still in a world controlled by entropy is to slowly fall apart.

This “slow decline of standing still” is such an easy trap to fall into. To KNOW that there is a God who loves you, but then to just go about your life, my life, as if that didn’t make a lot of difference. It’s getting trapped in the devil’s cage of “pretty good”.  How’s your life? Pretty good.  How’s your marriage, how’s your job, your health? Pretty good.  How’s your relationship with Jesus? Meh.  … I now think in a lot of ways this is right where the devil wants us. Happy enough, satisfied enough that we aren’t working to get better. Sure he loves the spectacular fall from grace, like a shooting star to liven his evening sky. But the slow steady dis-integration of a Christian is the devil’s warm, peaceful sunset.  This is Christianity inaction.  And it is not the path to, well, anywhere. Certainly not anywhere good.

I turned 50 this year. Yeah.  But dauting as that number is, it does afford me at least a bit of perspective and wisdom that I lacked when the number was a big more modest.  And as I’ve come to understand life, I’ve come to see that true joy requires motion. God is Goodness, Truth, Beauty, Joy – all the things we want more than anything else. And we know that if anything about Jesus is true, that he is the pathway to God. But we can’t follow Christ by standing still. And so I’ve grown to be a little less scared of the things that scare me and a little more eager to do the things I’m not eager to do, so long as those things are done in, with and for Love.

I received an email today – an email I’d been both anticipating and dreading. The subject? “Acceptance Letter”.  And so the journey begins.

Here I am, Lord, I come to do your will.
-Psalm 40