Last September I began writing a journal with some of my thoughts and encounters during chaplaincy. I’m going to start posting parts of it here from time to time… in the hope that God will be present in the stories, in the spaces, in the questions, in the love and hope at the heart of it all, sometimes deeply hidden but somehow always there.
Suffering can open us up or it can close us down. Choose in this moment who you want to become.
You shall know a tree by its fruits.
A man with MS for 20 years just learned that he will be sent to a nursing home. The say it’s temporary but he suspects that it will be forever. No matter how he fights, the disease is still stealing his mind and his strength. And the worst of it is, for right now at least, that the corporation is shrugging him off like a problem to be gotten rid of, he says. They push him out and their problem is solved. But his MS cannot be shoved aside. His problem will never go away. And when he says “corporation” over and over, I begin to suspect he means “God.”
“The corporation doesn’t care,” he says.
“Does God care?”
“Sure, but he can’t do anything about it.”
What is life if you suspect that God shrugs you off like so much problem to be gotten rid of? And if that is not what God has done, then where the hell is he?
StarPilgrim Studio 