The dog days of summer are here. The days are only a little bit shorter. And they are hotter, and the air stays warm at night.
It's the beginning of yet another month. I have written a great deal in this year 2011. Paging back through it, many things come vividly to mind. For example, I can remember how cold it was in February. Mmmmmm, that would be nice now!
This might seem strange, but I often go back to these posts and learn something from them, or remember something that I had forgotten. In desperate moments, I am reminded of the mercy and love of Jesus, and that He is worthy of my confidence. I see again how He has been working in my life, and surrounding me with signs of His tender care. I am frequently tempted to doubt. These pages have sustained me in the face of those temptations.
It's like having a diary (with a bit of scrapbook too), a diary that I show to everyone else. That's okay with me. I'm an open person, open to a fault. I'm one of those people who actually answers the question, "How are you?" I don't have many secrets; only the ones that I don't even tell myself. So of course there's some fibbing in these pages, but there would be in a locked and bolted diary book too, because we all lie to ourselves.
I know this: God is at work, in me, in our marriage, in our family, in these gestures and attempts to communicate. There are flaws everywhere. It all seems tinged by my faults and my self-centeredness, and especially by my vanity. There is vanity in my reflections and actions and especially in my words. Less, perhaps, than there used to be--I am learning a little more about how to let things go, if only because I am getting older and I just can't fool myself quite as well as I managed to do in the dreams of youth.
Of course, there are no doubt as yet undiscovered realms of foolishness in this, the sophomoric period of my middle age. The desire remains to be recognized and acknowledged, and frustration remains at being ignored. Yet that is not the whole explanation for why I write.
To paraphrase Fr. Carron, the point is not that I can talk about Christ being present in my life. The point is that He is present in my life. That is the difference. I probably talk about it too much. But in the midst of all these words there is testimony to the fact that He is here.
That is what really matters.
