Sowing God's Seeds

I said this morning’s rosary for God’s Mercy on our country.  Thoughts came to me as I prayed, and I stopped to jot down some notes, so I could write more later.  But after I had prayed a while longer this thought came to me: “Are you telling Me to wait?”  And so, I stopped and began to write these thoughts:

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I had a dream this morning, in which someone had somehow bothered me.  As a punishment, so he would learn not to do it again, I had him write lots of essay papers.  In my dream, I was coming back to see those papers when I saw a farm tractor pulling a huge cart, piled high with papers, ones he had written.  I saw they were full of spelling errors, and I sighed.  And then we came to the place where I was to meet the paper writer, but he was not there.  They said he had moved away, and they did not know where. 

And I initially felt that he did not learn my lesson, but then further thoughts came, that the one thing I HAD taught him was to stay away from me.  That was not my intention.

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Perhaps the trigger for that dream was the 8^th grade essay papers I was recently asked to assess.  They were for a contest, and a $25 prize.  The topic was: How can the Church evangelize in the digital age?  At my initial glance, the papers were not that good, having grammar errors, perhaps internet-found facts, and not conveyed logically or convincingly to my mature mind.  My initial grades were mediocre.  But then I thought how we will pick one of these papers to award, and send it forward to the state and national contests.  I knew these papers were unlikely to win there, so I re-graded them, recognizing the effort, in hope they would do better on next year’s essay contest.

And then I had the dream.  What was I teaching with my grading?

My grading effort was, like my dream, a form of punishment likely to accomplish nothing.  They would quickly forget my grading and move on. 

As I prayed the rosary this morning, after my dream about the value of punishment, I came to the Third Glorious Mystery, The Descent of the Holy Spirit, and I prayed: “Send me Your Spirit, Lord, that I might love as You would have me love.”  And I thought of my grading of the essays.  And new thoughts came to me.  I would have failed, when Jesus gave me an opportunity to show His love.  How would He grade?  How could this be a lesson in His love that I might convey for Him, to His children?  My dream of the value of punishment, at least this punishment, caused me to think on the matter yet again.

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Yesterday afternoon, I saw a podcast by a priest I never heard of before.  He spoke about the Gospel of John, the 13^th Chapter.  He read how Jesus had said “Love Me as I have loved you,” and the priest pointed to the large crucifix over the altar.  “That’s how He loved us, and asks us to love, to willingly suffer for the one we love.  That’s love.”

I thought of those words, and realized they were the answer to the essay question’s challenge, and to me, their grader’s concerns.  How can the Church convey Christ’s love, in the digital age, is the heart of the question.

I need to not just grade these papers, but also convey a message, a challenge with the help of God’s grace, not easily forgotten by the writers.  I now think I will write something along these lines at the end of each paper:

                Good effort at conveying facts, but the heart of the Church’s message is what Jesus said: “Love as I have loved” (on the cross).  How can you convey that message to someone feeling unloved, unneeded, unwanted in the digital age?  The real question is:  How can you make their phone hug them?

Perhaps those words will be a seed.