LETTING GOD BE GOD
“Those who are healthy do not need a physician, but the sick do. I have not come to call the righteous to repentance but sinners.” -Luke 5:27-32
These two lines swirl in my thoughts and in my heart from time to time. First, I did not have a clue the world that I would be born into and little did I know that I would be gifted with life to walk this Earth for forty years. Recently, have I only begun to have a sense of who I am, who God is calling me to be.
How many things of this world that ails us as human being? In fact, many things ail us as human beings - from the physical to the psychological, from the spiritual to the ego, from the head to the heart. For myself, it took the form of illnesses the first two-third parts of my life and then running the other way the last one-third part of my life without too many illnesses. My illnesses that came in the form of a triad (asthma, allergies, and eczema) began as harsh physical realities, then when I got better, they began impacting my mental and spiritual self.
I thought I was cursed growing up. I could see the burden in my parents’, my aunts’, and my grandparents’ faces. I could not run and play like my siblings, cousins, and classmates. I wanted to be “normal” instead of finding myself either at the nurse’s office or at the emergency room, again. So, I learned ways to hide my illnesses. I hated how sick I was. I hated how weak I was. I hated being made fun off because of my illnesses. I hated being me. I hated who God made me to be.
At the age of 26, the God of surprises granted me my wish to have a “normal” life and in 2009, I attended my first Caritas retreat and this was my place where I encountered the God of love. I knew something changed within me and it was an experience like taking a new breath of fresh air. These past feelings of being formidable, of hiding all these years, were all false. I knew this is the God that I had been searching all my life. Not the vending machine God or the lawyer God or the genie God. From that moment on and very sloooooooowly until today, I began presenting my ailments to God – from my physical world to things of my heart. I am transitioning these days to present everything to God and ending with the line in the Suscipé prayer by St. Ignatius of Loyola, “Give me only your love and your grace, that is enough for me.”
I remind myself often, if God is the alpha and the omega, what are all the possibilities in between? I know now, that I was not cursed as I initially thought. As human beings, our first and primary identity is to be the beloved child of God. Everything else in this world is secondary as in our illnesses, the titles that we hold (ie. mother, father, child, teacher, priest, nun, student, laity, etc.), the color of our skin, our sexuality, our age, our body type, what countries we immigrated from, what grades we got in school. What matters is how these secondary items help us to recognize God in everything more readily and easily to return to our first and primary identity. As in today’s gospel, then when Jesus beckons, “follow me,” I am ready to go.
So, what ails us as a human being? What can I take and offer up to God this Lenten season? Will I allow God to be God?
Tram Nguyen
Photo credit: Tram Nguyen