We are so quick to judge, but you would have thought we would know better by now. History abounds with examples of how faulty human judgment is, even on humanity's own terms, let alone when compared to God's.
Take Vincent Van Gogh, for example. Today his paintings are among the most valuable in the world. Yet when he died, he had sold only one. John Keats, dying at 24, considered himself a failure. But if they had given into the demands of the world - if Van Gogh had painted what would have made him money, if Keats had written what would have been published and acclaimed - how impoverished the world would be.
How often we sell ourselves short by insisting on immediate results. How often we forget that, in the lived experience of our great artists and our great saints, they lived lives completely on hope: a blind faith that their endeavors would bear fruit.
How does one persevere? Why keep painting or writing - or praying or preaching? Our world teaches us to "believe in ourselves." But I don't think this is enough. There is more at work here than individual creativity versus collective taste. It's not enough to say to ourselves: The world simply doesn't "get" me; I'm ahead of my time; people just don't know a good idea when they see it. This is sheer narcissism. This is not the path of Christ.
It's not about believing in ourselves: it's about believing in God. It's about giving our lives and our work to God, and trusting in Him to elevate and redeem what we do. We must "commit our way to the Lord" - we must trust that even the things we do in secret, things that are never recognized or acclaimed by human beings, bear fruit in God. Only God is eternal, and so only through God can our endeavors find permanence.
We pray to God that He may bless our work. Then we do our work, and entrust the fruit of it to God.
This is the lesson of Jesus on the Cross. Mocked, derided: a complete failure in the eyes of man. Judging with the judgments of man, those around him saw nothing but a defeated lunatic. Yet His last words: Into your hands I commend my spirit. Jesus placed His failure into the hands of His Father, and His Father transformed them into the greatest act of salvation humankind ever knew.
The point is: in that moment, Jesus was truly, existentially, a failure. It was not that He had some secret power His foes did not know about. It is not as though He could say: All right, kill me now, but in a few days I'll just come back anyway. In the moment of His death Jesus embodied the failure of humankind. It was not simply fear of pain and suffering that kept Jesus in agony at Gethsemane. It was a real, existential fear of failure, of the futility of His life's work, of the fruitlessness of His attempts to do God's will.
This is why at the end He had to say: Into your hands I commend my spirit. This was Jesus' act of faith: entrusting this failure to God. Can we speak these words with Christ? Into your hands I commend my life today, my work today. We are rejected, rebuffed; our plans fail, our ideas fall flat. Place these failures in God's hands. Trust that God is using those failures for a reason. Ask God to bring some good out of those failures - not for your own sake, but for the sake of others. Perhaps you will never see the fruits of your labors. Perhaps no human being will ever see the fruits. But beg from God the faith that there will be fruits, because you love Him and want to serve Him.
We live in this existential fear, I think. This fear that our lives are worthless, that what we do makes no difference. And in human terms, it's true: most of us will live quiet lives, our works will be forgotten when we die, and we will leave no real trace on the world. But when we believe that our lives are redeemed by God, then we can begin to see the value of our existence. God sees, God knows, and in God our lives are eternal. What we do here lives on in God forever. And through God, our smallest acts of kindness and charity will bear everlasting fruit.
Let God use you as He will. Perhaps you are meant for greatness in this world, recognized and acclaimed by your fellow human beings, either while you are still alive or after your death. Or perhaps you are simply meant to live a quiet, simple life, and will be forgotten in a hundred years. Either way, in God's eyes, you are eternal, so long as your life is lived in Him, so long as you commend yourself to Him in all you do.
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