He really is. We can't even begin to imagine how wildly overflowing, diffusive, and gratuitous He is in His goodness.
This is the very reason why His ways can seem strange and difficult to us. He sees the whole fulfillment of His goodness in eternity.
We don't see it. We journey through space and time, often with anxious, faltering steps, sometimes through heavy winds and fierce storms, sometimes in a moonless night.
We can get pretty disoriented, and wonder what's going on.
God is good. And He is true to the promise He has whispered in our hearts, and to the fullness of His revelation of that promise through Jesus. But He didn't promise it would be "easy."
He calls us to follow Him on the narrow path. He wants us to trust Him.
God is not easy with us. Though I'm sure He's much "easier"—kinder, more patient, more merciful, and more just—toward us than we are toward ourselves, and toward one another.
Nor should we be surprised that we do not understand His ways. God Himself is beyond our comprehension. He is the Mystery. He is never captured or grasped.
But He is trustworthy, and if we stay with Him, we will begin to understand the meaning and value of life and created things and the world and the peculiar moment of history He has entrusted to us.
He is merciful. He is faithful. He loves us. Indeed, He is with us!
This is what we are preparing to celebrate during the Advent season: He has come to dwell with us.
He has come, the One who creates and sustains our very being, our intelligence, our freedom. He has come, the One who is the ineffable source of the miracle that manifests itself everytime one of these strange little material entities in the universe says, "I am a 'someone'" and when it sees another speck of cosmic dust like itself and says, "You are a 'someone'!"
He has come, the One who makes our mysterious, otherwise inexplicable personhood real, vital, and so intimate that it is truly "our own." He comes to be with us, to be close to us, to fulfill to the end His fidelity, His mercy, His love for us.
He has come: Jesus.
He, the Eternal Word, took flesh in the womb of a woman, the always-and-all-holy woman He chose and prepared to be His mother. Jesus born of the Virgin Mary.
He has come to dwell with us, to make us His brothers and sisters. He wants us to be with Him forever, to share with Him the fulllfillment of all things, and above all to share in His own inexhaustible life, His glory, His joy, His love.
This is not "easy," but we don't really want "easy"; we want to be moved, to live beyond ourselves, toward a reality that is mysterious and great and good.
He comes, who encompasses and surpasses all our aspirations. Let us take time, in these days, to make room for Him in the center of our hearts, of our lives.
