Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

The Epistle for today ends with a challenge for each believer. It calls us to, “…do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.”

I love that last phrase, “so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.” So much of our lives is spent on relatively fruitless pursuits. We only find them fruitless, it too often seems, on the other side of experience. Perhaps that is what wisdom is—learning to see the patterns of what is true and what is a distraction. The people I meet who are wise are the ones who seem to understand how fleeting our time is and how little we grasp life that really is life.

We study, earn, strive, climb, scramble, and despair in the constant agitation of graspng. Yet we never truly hold on to something worthwhile—something that feels firm enough to pull us up and to hold us firm. The challenge we hear in Scripture is less a challenge than it is a promise. We can do all the things that we are told by the world will make us happy. We can feast and never be full. We can drink far more than our fill and still thirst. We can store up treasure after treasure and never be more than we all are—a beggar at the door of the storehouse of grace.

The promising challge is that we can live for others. We can live for God. In that living, in that giving away of ourselves, we will store up the treasure of a good foundation. We will find ourselves building the fortune of a well-lived, well-loved life. In turing our hunger, thirst, and energy toward God we will find them repaid not as the world repays, with even more empty desires, but repaid with the fullness of God’s own self. We will find ourselves taking hold of the life that really is life.

May we take hold this week of God, of the chances to find and be found by him, to spend and be spent for him, to love and be loved—for that is the life that is life.

Yours in Christ,

Fr Robert