by Joshua Ruoff
A line from one of my favorite songs is: “We’re not OK, but we’re all gonna be alright.”
These last few weeks and months in the archdiocese and the universal church have been filled with change, which while in the end can usually be good, at first can be challenging and even difficult.
Humans are not innately good at accepting and conforming to change. We think we thrive in familiarity and comfort. However, God has other desires for us. He wants us to learn to be comfortable with the uncomfortable so that we can grow in our trust and our dependence on him as our Father.
It is important in difficult times more than any time in our life that we keep grounded in our faith, our prayer life and in reality. It can be easy during periods of change for our minds to explore the “what if’s” of change.
We try to control the things that are not in our control and when we discover we can’t control them, we get worried, anxious, and can fall into despair and depression. It is not “bad” to have “bad” emotions.
In fact there is no such thing as a bad emotion. Emotions are our bodies telling us that something needs attention, whether it’s a physical, emotional, mental, spiritual or environmental need. So if you find yourself experiencing an emotion that you think is “bad,” don’t ignore it or run away from it. Sit with it in prayer and invite the Holy Spirit to give you the graces to understand what the emotion is telling you.
I think that it is no coincidence that during this season of change in our local and universal church we’ve celebrated Pentecost, the “birthday” of the church.
It serves to remind us that despite all the earthly changes we experience, one thing always remains: the church that was given to us by the Father because of his never- changing love for us so that we could be one with him. My hope is that the church can be a reminder to those who are not OK, that in the end, it’s all gonna be alright.
May God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can and the wisdom to know the difference.
