HE HAS BREATHED HIS OWN BREATH INTO YOU
Wednesday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time
My dear encountered couples:
The range of foolish and evil things of which we human beings are capable never ceases to astonish. We destroy our bodies and sometimes our brains with controlled substances, even though we know better. We make stupid choices that we know in advance will lead to trouble. We devastate our marriages and friendships by repeating the same mistakes again and again. How often we’ve heard it said, quite correctly, “She’s married the same man again.”
And that’s just the stupid part. There’s also the downright evil side of us, the lying, cheating, stealing and killing, the willingness to wage war for no good reason, the willingness to tolerate an unjust society, the willingness to turn our backs on the poor and the suffering. All in all, between stupidity and downright evil, this human nature of ours seems a fairly nasty piece of work.
Yet, there’s something more to us than all that, and today’s first reading from Genesis gives us a hint of it. After God formed Adam’s body from the clay, the story says that He breathed into Adam’s nostrils HIS OWN BREATH. In a word, there is more to us than sin and foolishness. There is something of God’s own life in us, something holy and precious that should give us hope.
We are made for something more, something very special, and God will never stop trying to help that emerge onto the center stage of our lives.
So never despair. Never give up. He has breathed His own breath into you, and He doesn’t intend that it be wasted!
