Today's first reading from the prophet Jeremiah is an interesting one.
It starts with words of despair from the prophet:
Woe is me, my mother, for you have borne me to be a man of strife and of dissension for all the land. I neither lend nor borrow, yet all of them curse me.
Like many of us, the prophet is following God's word but he is finding challenging to find a sense to it all:
Why is my suffering continual, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed? Do you mean to be for me a deceptive stream with inconstant waters?
The reading then ends on a positive note, with the Lord reassuring Jeremiah that he has not been forgotten:
They will come back to you, but you must not go back to them. I will make you a bronze wall fortified against this people. They will fight against you but they will not overcome you, because I am with you to save you and to deliver you – it is the Lord who speaks.
The phrase that struck me the most was "Do you mean to be for me a deceptive stream with inconstant waters?"
It contains a significant part of how I have felt at times in my life.
It seems I am going in one direction. I get hopeful. I see a way to change things for the better. I take it as a sign that the Lord is not refusing to heal my suffering.
Then all of the sudden the direction changes. I go back to square one or sometimes farther back.
Like a "deceptive stream with inconsistent waters".
I often asked myself what to make of all of this.
If I look at the people of faith that I know, they seem to justify everything that God does in a sort of blind faith into somebody they have never seen but that they seem to experience, or so they say, regularly.
God knows what is good for me - this is their usual response.
For sure, in retrospect I can appreciate that a lot of things that I wanted were not for my own good.
The fact I didn't get them was something that I consider a blessing rather than a curse.
The way I prefer to look at this, rather than blindly reaffirming that everything is good, I see opportunities for improving myself.
The continual suffering is a life in which I am called to gradually become a better version of me, a version of me that is more in touch with the source everything originated from.
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