This past Thursday, as I attended Holy Mass, there was a slight disturbance that took place which broke into a deep sense of pondering it.
We also look at distractions as nothing more than aggravations or personal spiritual attacks, which take place to disturb us from where WE want to be, and seldom look at them as a means to ponder our Lord more deeply.
Just before the liturgy of the Word at Holy Mass, as the Lector began to read, she realized that the microphone was not working. She fumbled about trying to get it to work for a while and after a few silent moments summonsed the altar servers and they went into the back to turn them on. As I was focused on the problem, I realized my attention was taken away from our Lord. It was a moment of silence in which I heard our our distinctively say to me, “Pray”. And in that very moment of hearing Him, I prayed for the problem to be fixed. The very second my interior prayer ended, the microphones worked and the Lector continued on. It was not me who made this work. It was not me who did anything. I did nothing. It was our Lord who did everything. And this is true for all prayers. Its not us who make the flowers grow. We dig the holes and plant the seeds, we water them and it is our Lord who makes them grow.
As I pondered this moment in the last few days I came to see how helpless and useless we truly are without the direction of our Lord. In that moment of silence, my focus being on the little distraction, and not on Him, I couldn’t even remember to pray for this issue for her to come to a close, without the direction of our Lord to have to tell me to pray. And in that moment, He showed me that in asking, we truly do receive and “without me you can do nothing”.
How deep a fact that is of our Lord, to come to grips with this? It draws me into John 5:30, in which our Lord says, “I cannot do anything on my own; I judge as I hear, and my judgment is just, because I do not seek my own will but the will of the one who sent me.”
“I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”