89 Views no discussions FaithLifestyleLocalNews Things in the right hands by: – July 30, 2011 Share Sharing is caring! Tweet
Share Share Photo credit: hubpages.comPut a cricket bat in my hands, it remains little more than a polished piece of wood. I know how to make show of trying a few shots, but that’s about it. Put it in the hands of someone like Lara or Tendulkar, and you have an instrument of elegance and record. Put a trumpet in the average person’s hand. When he or she starts to blow, people would scamper for cover. Put it in the hands of Miles Davis, and you would be immediately entranced. Put a paint brush in the average person’s hands, they wouldn’t know what to do beyond giving something ‘a first coat.’ Put it in the hands of Picasso, and you couldn’t pay for the result.It makes a difference when you put things in the right hands. That’s certainly a crucial lesson at the heart of this well-known miracle. Put limited resources in God’s hands, and you cannot foresee what will issue from so doing. Out of scarcity and lack what may often surprise you is abundance.Putting things in the rights hands doesn’t come easily. Most of us are the sort of people who like to see in advance how things will work out before we commit ourselves. Imagine, for instance, that you’re at a crossroad in life, you wonder about taking a different job, for example, or striking out on your own, or deciding whether to marry this person rather than that.If you are the kind of person who has to know how things will turn out before you do anything, you will never know what stepping out on faith means. It does not mean, of course, that you make no prudential assessment before you set out – faith is no substitute for thoughtlessness ; but even after all such assessments are made, faith means that you step out in trust.Philip’s response is the typical response most of us would have made under the circumstances. How could you ask me to provide bread for all these people? Months of salary like mine couldn’t pay for it, and you want me to do it just like that?” It never occurred to Philip to say something like: “Feed all these people?!!! You know what that means???!! Anyway, you’re the boss, and if you say so, let’s see how we go about organizing…” But Phillip said the opposite, and we too would have said the same, if we were in his shoes. In trying situations, all we see are the trying circumstances, in situations of dilemma, all we see are the dilemmas. We want God to rid us of the burdens of perplexity and solve our problems even before we do any assessment ourselves.Faith is not calculation; it is trust. It is not God wishing away our burdens or our difficulties; it is God asking us to trust him through them. And very often, as we sometimes experience, we come through it in a way we don’t anticipate, in a way perhaps that we never dreamed.I have myself felt the force of much of what I say. I have the same hesitation, which sometimes amount to a sort of near paralysis. I will just share something along other lines, thought the dynamic is really much the same. Every preacher has to contend with difficult texts. Sometimes you have no insight, no thoughts; you don’t know where to go with certain passages or statements. My experience is that the most difficult passages sometimes produce the most unexpected results, not so much from the point of view of my dealing with them, as from what people get from them. I am sometimes quite amazed at the surprising results of what are, as I think, pretty awful performances. No doubt I will in the future still find some texts hard and certain passages difficult, but what I ought to remember is that the outcome of struggling with them does not depend on how I anticipate the outcome. That’s calculation, not faith. My hands are not finally the place where these and other things are properly left. Struggle and effort remain necessary, but more necessary than that is the trust required to leave things – and keep leaving them – in the right hands.By: Father Henry Charles Ph. d
Things in the right hands
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