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Grace in the Moment
Do the best you can and trust in Jesus
By Mary van Balen-Holt
“She did the best she could.” The young boy’s voice floated across the room filled with mourners. I sat in the back and could scarcely see the top of his blond head that rose above the lectern. He was about eight now I figured. When I first met him and his mother he was too young to walk.
“She loved her kids more than anything.” He paused. “That’s all.”
Muffled sobs were the only sound as he walked back to the seat beside his uncle who had been raising him for the past four years. Despite efforts to pull away from the circle of friends immersed in the drug culture, his mother was unable to break the habit. Interludes of being clean became shorter and now, at twenty-six, she was dead of an overdose.
I remembered better days when she brought her son to our program and studied to earn her GED. When she did, we dressed her in a donated high school graduation cap and gown, played a recording of “Pomp and Circumstance,” and had a party. She was beaming. I smiled remembering one Halloween, when the theme was “favorite book characters;” she dressed up as Saint Katharine Drexel in honor of my biography of Katharine that had just been released.
“You may go up now and pay your respects if you’d like.” The funeral home director’s words startled me. I walked up to the casket, pausing long enough to whisper a prayer that she was at last free of torment. I stopped and gave her son a hug, reminding him of what a good student his mother had been and how much she loved him.
Two days earlier I had seen the movie “Precious,” and thought of my student. Both Precious and my student started life being sexually abused as toddlers. Abuse is something no one wants to look at, but the problem belongs to all of us. For some, like my student, it can be the beginning of a life filled with violence, a downward spiral eventually too strong to escape.
“She did the best she could.” Her son’s words haunted me. We all try to do our best, but often it seems, that is not enough. Parents know this truth all too well, looking back over their childrearing years, thinking, “I wish I had done that,” or “I never should have said that.” Workaholics wish they had spent more time with those they love, students regret not applying themselves more diligently to their studies, spouses regret angry words and unspoken hostility. Advent reassures me that our best is enough because God’s love supplies what is lacking: unconditional, unselfish love.
This Advent’s readings reminds us of that truth so gloriously proclaimed by the birth of Jesus. Whether they come from the Old Testament as in Isaiah, “Say to those whose heart is frightened: Be strong, fear not! Here is your God…he comes to save you”(35.4) and “…no more will you weep…The Lord will give you the bread you need and the water for which you thirst”(30.19a;20a), or from the gospels as in Matthew when Jesus heals the suffering: “The crowds were amazed when they saw the mute speaking, the deformed made whole, the lame walking…”(16.31) and in Luke when the angel Gabriel tells Mary her cousin has conceived and “…nothing will be impossible for God.”(1.37).
These words may sound hollow to those mourning the loss of a twenty-six year old mother or people struggling with abuse, violence, poverty, or illness. But this is the truth we are called to proclaim. Like Jesus, we are called to proclaim it with our lives, not just in church or in quiet moments of personal prayer. Jesus called Peter and Andrew to become “…fishers of men…”(Matt 4.19), not to retire to his house and pray. He warned against feeling self-righteous, “…tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you”(Matt. 21.31).
How easy to write off people like Precious or my student, to allow ourselves to think problems of abuse are not problems for “people like us.” How easy to forget that the justice and peace Jesus promises to bring depends on everyone doing “the best they can,” carrying on the work of the incarnation, and allowing God to fill in when we fall short.
Copyright 2009 by Mary van Balen-Holt.
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