I wasn’t sure I could make it up all those steps. I was beginning to feel that this might be thrusting me over the edge of my endurance level. I could turn back, but I kept thinking – the top can’t be too far away. I was so tired I couldn’t look up. I could only look at the stone step ahead of me and move one foot and then another. And then I was at the top. The last one up. Sinai! (Sr. Gail Fitzpatrick)
Sometimes running the race that St. Paul talks about can seem like a very slow crawl or stumbling along. Yet we continue one step at a time. In all areas of life anything that is worthwhile seems to require a death to our concern about personal comfort or pleasure. St. Paul talks about how athletes give up everything in order to win a crown that is passing. Loving parents deal with a great deal of fatigue in carrying for their children. They sacrifice anything that will impede their living out their love for their children. So yes anything worthwhile has a heavy price.
In our lives of faith can we give less? Sr. Gail, at the end of her endurance, still took the next step, then the next, and suddenly she was there….even if she was the last one. No comparisons with others, we just need to continue in faith and when we stumble we simply get back up. If we feel we are the least, well that might not be a bad place to be.
In waiting on the Lord it is the same. We run the race by simply sitting in a place of feeling nothing, but yet in hope, we long for the love of the living waters in our dryness. We learn that in the end, it is all grace and we will get what we need not what we want. We slowly learn to trust in God’s loving presence no matter what we go through….in that we find our true oasis and start to understand the meaning of the word ‘joy’.
Br. Mark Dohle, OCSO
Holy Spirit Monastery
