Early In The Morning

I was up very early this morning. It is a gloomy looking start to the day and it is refreshingly cool as I sit by the window with my computer thinking about what I want to say this weekend.  To be honest, I feel a little bit down today.  I look back at my life and I see nothing noteworthy that I have accomplished. It seems everything I have tried has come to naught.  I look at the lives of others and with suppressed envy I wonder why the key to success does not fit the lock I have been given. This is a very rare thing for me to be feeling this way. I am normally a guy who sees the glass as being half full, not half empty.  

There have been a few changes in my life recently, nothing too bad but changes none the less.  The most important of these changes is that my Type 2 Diabetes has become harder and harder to control with just oral medications and TLC care, so my doctor has put me on Lantus, a long acting synthetic insulin. Some of my friends have offered their sympathy and while I am grateful that they think that this is something to mourn about, it really is just another medication and I have adapted to it.  In my life too there have been things I have had to adjust to. I know it was bound to happen sooner or later and I think deep inside of me, in the part of my brain where "self failures" are stored I still consider this to be a failure.  this has been added to the list my brain has compiled when it wants to make me feel sorry for myself.  

My brother and sisters for reasons known only to them have in effect abandoned me and since the death of my father eight years ago I have truly been an orphan, declared persona non gratis by those that should be closest to me. I mourn about this regularly and pray to God often and ask Him why he has permitted this. 

Now, why am I sharing all of this personal stuff with you?  It is because our Gospel today is the story of Mary and Martha. You know, Mary is running around serving the guests while Martha is sitting at the feet of Jesus listening to him speak.  Our deacon pointed out that what Mary is giving us is a poor me type of a story. She is saying "Oh poor me, look at how hard I have it, why me?" 

I truly believe that God has a plan for us and it is our job to cooperate as best as we can with that plan.  People come and go in your life and it is a fact that the ones that you love most are the ones that can hurt you the most.  As for me, I bear no ill will towards my estranged family.  I have granted them what their heart seems to yearn for, my absence in their lives. I leave it up to God to someday to tell me why this has happened.  This of course has caused my spirit to suffer, to feel lonely and abandoned but I offer my anguish and sadness that the situation causes me up to the Lord and ask Him, as Paul did in our second reading today, to add it to the all sufficient suffering he experienced on the cross for us. 

There is a purpose for everything under God's universe.  My puny mind and my sin weakened soul cannot hope to know what specific part those things that appear as evil in my life will have in bringing the ultimate plan of God into fruition, but I just have to remember that it will.  For the disappointments in life, for those things that have caused me pain and suffering I accept them and thank God for them because I know that He will ultimately place all things under his feet.