God the Master Designer

God the Master Designer

April 17, 2013

Wednesday in the Third Week of Easter

By Colleen O'Sullivan

There broke out a severe persecution of the Church in Jerusalem, and all were scattered throughout the countryside of Judea and Samaria, except the Apostles.  Devout men buried Stephen and made a loud lament over him.  Saul, meanwhile, was trying to destroy the Church; entering house after house and dragging out men and women, he handed them over for imprisonment.

Now those who had been scattered went about preaching the word.  Thus Philip went down to the city of Samaria and proclaimed the Christ to them.  With one accord, the crowds paid attention to what was said by Philip when they heard it and saw the signs he was doing.  For unclean spirits, crying out in a loud voice, came out of many possessed people, and many paralyzed and crippled people were cured.  There was great joy in that city. (Acts 8:1b-8)

Piety

Say to God, “How tremendous are your deeds!”  (Psalm 66:3a)

Study

One summer, when I was much younger, I went on an 8-day Ignatian retreat.  The first evening I met with the priest who was directing my retreat, who asked me to spend the next day reflecting on God’s blessings in my life.  That sounded fine until he added, “Now that includes the bad as well as the good, you know.”  I went back to my room wondering how anything bad could be a blessing.  But as I thought back over my, at that point, relatively short life, I began to see what he meant.  Today, with many more years of life experience behind me, I know exactly what he meant.  It’s generally only in looking back that we see the pattern, but when we’re open to God’s leading, God has a way of transforming our sorrows and adversities as well as our failures and the consequences of our sins, so that something good does emerge from them.  It’s like the proverbial tapestry image, where we stitch one side of the tapestry with our lives.  Sometimes the yarn gets tangled or we drop a stitch and the whole thing looks like a mess at that spot.  But God is always at work from behind, transforming our imperfect stitches into what becomes a beautiful tapestry. 

That tapestry image came to mind as I read today’s reading from the Book of Acts.  At first all we see is chaos for the Christians in Jerusalem.  There’s Saul, the home invader.  When he broke down a follower of the Way’s door, it was off to prison with them.  There’s Stephen being buried, having been murdered for proclaiming his faith in Christ.  There are the apostles saying they’ll stay in the city but sending the others fleeing for their lives to the countryside of Judea and Samaria.  Very frightening and turbulent days in the life of the early Church and far from anything that remotely resembled a blessing.

But, in the verses immediately following, we see the Lord at work bringing something good out of it.  If the persecutions hadn’t taken place, who knows if the disciples would ever have left Jerusalem.  But circumstances turned them into missionaries carrying the word to those who otherwise might never have met Christ. The word was proclaimed, the sick were healed, evil was cast out.  New Christians were filled with joy at the Good News, and the fledgling church expanded and grew.  That’s God taking the threads of hatred, persecution and fear, and transforming them into something beautiful to behold!

Action

Where in your life have you seen God working such transformation?