2022-11-26 A Meditation on Loved Nonetheless

“Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a desolate place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them and healed their sick.” (Mt 14:13–14 ESV)

To rest up for game day is a matter of harboring reliable go-to’s, rattling off what doesn’t tax the soul too much; yet this is where we find that the pressing matter is influencing our heart: we must testify, we must go all-in, we must serve. So we forget that game plan of resting up, knowing that the strength is a supernatural variety.

Strength is to input friendship and turn that around to output friendship. It is to input sentiments (depression, worldliness, boredom, angst, ennui) and nonetheless still to output friendship. It is to input fondness, pride in our person, fatherly or motherly affection, and to output patient companionship. All this, while tired. All this, while half asleep. All this, because the day is still with us, and night is coming when no woman or man may work (Jn 9:4).

Resting up means serializing, automating, mechanizing some strange patterns neither familiar nor common. But these patterns are ones of Christ-like generosity; they are ones like Christ-like sensitivity; they are ones like Christ-like curiosity regarding more plain need than what traditional conversation dictates; they are regarding passing on that basic message that it is going to be okay. That it is going to be a test that is easy, that God’s burden is light and his yoke easy (Matt 11:30).

So some evade, curling up, feeling their very armor as a man, as a woman, is tested: men should be tough-talking and confident; women either demure or pleasant, but in any case, not needy or vulnerable. We invent what to a sage eye is very much still need and angst and insecurity and prayer for there to be good authority, for the Author of our lives to see us in our filth and mess, and simply to do something perhaps unattractive: to love us as such. And in the fact of having someone stick up for us, someone to love us, we become more attractive to others. This is a tenet of Law and Gospel discussions.