What obstacles are standing in your way right now? What grace(s) do you need from God to break through them and let the light in?
These are the questions I placed at the end of my short JesuitPrayer.org reflection today. These questions came to me in response to today’s Gospel – the one where the people break through the roof to bring their friend to Jesus for healing. They had to physically break through a barrier, but my personal barriers aren’t always made of physical materials.
Right now, I think my biggest obstacle or barrier is anxiety (maybe it’s there for all of us) – particularly letting even the smallest hiccups in my day affect how I see the rest of it unfold.
Yesterday, I let one email affect the way I felt about everything else that afternoon. Certainly, the contents of the email were important for me to digest, but letting it fester and affect the rest of my interactions that afternoon was not a healthy way to proceed.
So how do I let small things like that go? Perhaps the biggest way is to pray for the grace(s) I need. With regards to yesterday, the grace I needed the most was perspective. I needed the ability to look beyond the information in that one paragraph and see the bigger picture. I needed to process and empathize with the viewpoint before me, and I needed to take into context other factors at play. Finally, I needed to make sure I didn’t beat myself up. I needed to separate berating myself from understanding and processing the situation at hand.
So, what’s your obstacle today? What’s the barrier you are trying to break through? Identify it and bring it to God. May God give you and me all the grace we need today to face our obstacles and let the light in. Let us see this Gospel passage as affirmation that God is ready to answer us when we come knocking.
(Check our my reflection today over at JesuitPrayer.org along with a prayer by St. Peter Faber, SJ)
