Day 2: Do What You Can, Pray for What You Can't

I write a lot about lofty topics concerning faith, theology, and spirituality, but if you want to know the truth...sometimes I'm just a grumpy tired burnt-out parent that just got off a five minute yelling streak and made myself feel better by eating three bowls of salted caramel ice cream, assumed the fetal position on the couch while my kids ignore the rice and beans I tried to feed them for dinner and I don't know what they're doing or watching on TV because I'm falling asleep because I just drank a beer and was up at 5:30am and my wife is at a work function and I'm just trying to survive. Then your wife comes home and you snap her head off for leaving you with these heathens even though its not her fault and she bringing home that bacon anyway so you can't get mad, but you're just so tired, so defeated, so very un-spiritual.

What do you write about then?? I suppose you write about failure, Simon Peter style ("Aren't you one of his disciples?..."

St. Pope John Paul II wrote in his 1993 encyclical Veritatis Spendor:

"God does not command the impossible, but in commanding he admonishes you to do what you can and to pray for what you cannot, and he gives his aid to enable you. His commandments are not burdensome (cf. 1 Jn 5:3); his yoke is easy and his burden light (cf. Mt 11:30)"

Lent is a great balancing act. When we err to much on the side of our works and spiritual exercises, we may be tempted to think we are in no need of God's grace and mercy, that we might be fooled into thinking we can do things on our own, without Him. It is not long after such endeavors are undertaken, however, that we are usually quickly (Day 2!) humbled by the Lord with our abject failures to maintain goodness on our own apart from Him. Failure then becomes a great grace to bring us back to center. 

When I am failing and sinking, or under temptation, my go-to prayer is Ps 69:2: "O God, come to my assistance. Oh Lord, make haste to help me!" Quick, to the point, and earnest. The Lord does not disappoint in giving me what I need in that moment to get through.

While everything doesn't rest on our shoulders, we also can't eschew what we are legitimately called to carry out either because "grace will take care of it," lest we risk our spiritual muscles atrophying for those times when we are called to times of suffering and persecution.  If becoming a saint was easy, everyone would be one. Spiritual athletes need training too.

And so we must do what we can, and pray for what we cannot. 

Thank you, Lord, for the gift of humility through failure!

"For I have the desire to do good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do--this I keep on doing...What a wretched man I am! Who will save me from this body of death? Thanks be to God--through Jesus Christ our Lord!" (Rom 7:18-19; 24-25)