A good friend of mine and Catholic speaker, Bob Lesnefsky, once told me a story about his son Toby.
Toby is one of seven kids and, truth be told, he has always been a quirky kid. One day Bob and his wife Kate decided to go out to dinner with the family, and as you can imagine that’s a huge challenge to take on when you have a large family. At the time Toby was about five years old and during dinner, Bob and Kate decided to do a quick headcount only to realise that one of the kids was missing. To no one’s surprise, it was Toby.
They frantically scanned around the restaurant, only to find him hidden under their long table hoarding packets of sugar, eating them as quickly as he could. Bob grabbed Toby from under the table and to spare the restaurant from his looming public meltdown, they ordered takeaway trays and decided to cut dinner short.
On the drive home, it was oddly silent. Bob looked in his rearview mirror, to see Toby grabbing handfuls of sugar packets from his coat pocket and eating them. He thought to himself, “you have got to be kidding me”, angrily pulled over on the roadside, and let out a frustrated, “Toby!” Toby looked up at him with puppy dog eyes, and at that moment Bob decided to make this a teaching moment. “Toby, you have a question to answer. What do you love more, sugar or God?”
Toby looked down with great intensity and shame. Then, he slowly put up his hand and said, “Sugar number one. Candy number two. God number three.” Bob looked at his son with horror, and responded, “God number three?! What’re you talking about ‘God number three’?”
I wanted to share this story with you because I think that if we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that there’s a little bit of Toby inside all of us. Maybe not all of us relate to his love of sugar, but we can certainly relate to putting things before God. How do we do this? It usually isn’t just a decision we make one day to bump God down our list. In my experience, it’s usually a slow turning away.
In our world today we often encounter two ways of living. The first is that God doesn’t exist so we are free to do anything we want because nothing matters. The second is living with the belief that God does exist and that we shouldn’t do anything that we want because what we do has meaning and consequences. Sometimes we might get caught up feeling like life would be easier if we could live in ignorance and do whatever we like. It allures us with a delusion that losing is impossible, but what we fail to recognise is that if nothing matters then winning is also impossible.
Picture yourself in a swivel chair facing God. Let’s say that this represents our relationship with God. God created us to be in relationship with Him and to share in His goodness. The very first thing that Catechism says is that “God, infinitely perfect and blessed in Himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make Him share in His own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength” (CCC 1). Shortly after it goes on to say that, “The desire for God is written in the human heart because man is created by God and for God, and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for “ (CCC 27). In short, God created you, and because you are here, you have meaning.
God creates us to be in relationship with Him, but He doesn’t force us to sit in our swivel chair facing him. In His authenticity, God says that we can choose. A lot of us start out facing Him, but then things start to catch our peripheral, and we slowly swivel our chair. We get so distracted that we look around to orient ourselves and we find that God is nowhere to be seen. God has not abandoned us, those distractions have caused us to swivel our chair so that we cannot see Him sitting behind us, waiting for us to turn back to Him and make Him number one again.
This turning away from God is a familiar theme we see throughout salvation history and all of the covenants (promises). The Old Testament is a story of God making covenants with man, and man failing time and time again. God never gives up on man, He always has a plan to bring us back to Him. We see this culminate in the new covenant with Jesus. This is the story of salvation history, but also the story of our own lives. God creates us in relationship, we turn away, God reaches out to us, and we respond.
Over and over again this is the pattern of the spiritual life. I have found myself at times turned away from God. I’ve had times of being angry and frustrated with God, but He never abandoned me. He never held that against me. He wasn’t offended by my anger and resentment. He has never hesitated to reach out to me in my woundedness and is never afraid to get His hands dirty. He just wants to be with me, and He wants to be with you.
“The Word became flesh so that thus we might know God’s love (CCC 458).” This is the greatest act of love in history. He who is clouded in irreproachable light, the unmoved mover, the uncaused cause, the Creator of all, takes flesh and does so as movement to our heart. That in His suffering and death He bridges the gap between heaven and hell created by sin. In His resurrection, He destroys death and gains for us eternal life and leaves us His Spirit, His Word, and His Church so that we can have the relationship that Adam and Eve lost for us. It is in this relationship that our physical world takes on new meaning. Our faith is beautiful because, like God, it is incarnational.
As we continue to celebrate Easter, I urge you to reflect on the Kerygma. The foundation of our faith and what that means for us. Reflect on your own story, the times when you’ve swivelled your chair. The times when the Lord has pursued you. And lastly, I want to leave you with a challenge: Open Scripture to the book of Acts and read Acts 2:14-36. This is the first kerygmatic proclamation of Peter. As you read it, maybe multiple times, let Peter proclaim it to you. What does it mean to you? What are you feeling? Think about when you first heard the Kerygma proclaimed to you and let our Saviour tenderly speak to your heart.
