Come on, friends, get up now you're not alone at all.
I am a faith filled person. For all my jabs and jokes, I'm not kidding when I say there is nothing that sustains me like faith. When I was going through a difficult time in my life, and had fallen away from faith, I was flailing for answers, completely lost. I had allowed it to become marginal, an afterthought. My soul's immune system was weak and feeble, and so I easily gave into the illnesses which plagued it...resentment, jealousy, greed...eventually becoming indifferent to my environment. When finally I was knocked down, it didn't take long for me to confront the real root of my heart ache, and it had more to do with spiritual dehydration than it did anything else I had done, or had happened to me. I began to pray. I imagined my heart with missing a half, like a torn piece of paper with jagged edges. Each time I went to mass, each time I prayed, each time I reached out to another person, those missing pieces of my heart would regenerate. I told myself that it would take a long time before my heart would be strong, and complete. It might even be a lifetime journey. After all, 'Rome wasn't built in a day.' But every day, I pictured it. I closed my eyes, concentrating where I had left off the day before, and imagined my heart being filled, expanding to bridge the void which had been left by sadness, regret....apathy. That time, as all time, blurs out of focus the farther I move from it. I always think of it, though, as a reminder of how far my faith has come, and how blessed my life has been.
You see, I've never known what it is like to feel truly lonely. I'm sure I haven't. I don't know how it feels to have not a soul to call my own, a friend to hold my hand, or a parent or sibling to listen and soothe. I owe that to my faith. Because what I finally realized from all that praying, and envisioning my beating heart, is that I have the most invaluable asset in the entire universe. I have ME. I was gifted with the cognizance to recognize my strengths, with my weaknesses, the people who've been given me to enhance those strengths, and patch those weaknesses. I have the innate ability to pick myself up, and dust myself off, and keep moving. There is no greater gift than the gift of love, and I can love myself. Once I learned that--really learned it, I more clearly understood the responsibility we are each tasked with: loving ourselves, loving others as ourselves, when they've strayed from self-love to self-loathing. We have our work cut out for us. I work in a place fraught with people who don't love themselves. They treat their bodies and their lives with no respect, which results in the crimes they commit, and the hatred and indifference they show to their community and its citizens. But I wouldn't even need a front row seat in the courtroom to be exposed to the likes of such people. I would need only to live in our world--it's splashed across headlines each day. My heart, whole it now is, hurts for all those who suffer at the hands of callous individuals, but it hurts for those individuals, too. Because I believe, with my whole heart, that there is no such thing as good and evil people...only good and evil acts. Each of us has the chance, the talents, the strength, an inherent spark to rise up and meet the low times in our lives, and rebuke the temptation to hurt ourselves and others.
I don't picture my heart anymore in order to heal it....because, thank God, and right now, I don't need to. I ask, instead, for more room, more strength, more time. I know it's in me...it's in each of us. As we all prepare to go off and celebrate a day of thanks, I ask myself why giving thanks gets only one day to be recognized. We should be thankful every. single. day. We should be recognizing what our gifts are, and then using those gifts to help the 'lonely' and the 'lowly', each other, and ourselves. I can tell you with absolute certainty that 'it IS in giving that we receive'. If only each person in the world took the time to have faith, will faith, and give faith through whichever path we follow!! Can you even imagine the outcome!?
We could build Rome in a day.
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