Dear Everyone- A Few Thoughts on Desire [With grateful thanks to writer and fellow youth minister Morgan Schmidt] :
I like Amazza pizza and I got one last
night for our family, just because I wanted
it. Amazza pizza is comfort on some days. Being able to call them up and
pick up a pie answers a desire. Wanting good pizza is good and bad. On the one
hand, eating pizza every day would add to my ever-expanding, 48 year-old
waist-line.
I enjoy good food cooked well and the love
and care put into great, authentic pizza. Amazza pizza’s crust is cooked to perfection because someone back in the
kitchen has perfected the art of Neopolitan crust. I enjoy a good pizza crust
just like I enjoy a great painting, a Bob Dylan song or a gorgeous sunset. The blessing
of enjoying God’s creation through tasty food was granted when God created us
to enjoy her creation. Time and
again, she calls this world “good” and even “very good” and very good pizza
crust is a part of God’s goodness.
Your lives are just getting started and
you are capable of doing and experiencing some mighty wonderful stuff with your
created bodies in this beautiful world. Some of you have matched your desire up
with things you do like sports or performing or art or science, and you are
even good at it. All of you have things you love to do and people you love
deeply, so you understand desire. Within your desire, we can find things that
are good and even discover God at work.
God wants you to know God and to know that
you are a child of God. Within the beauty, pleasure, achievement, pain and even
heartache surrounding your desires God’s ever present pursuit of you can surface. Desire, in of itself, was
given to us by God. What we do with it has the potential to separate us from or
please God.
So, I hope Church can be a place for you
where you can find what you want and where God can find you. The Church is,
when she is at her best, a living reminder that all that God wants, quite simply,
is you. When we pray the Holy Eucharist we start off
with the story of our creation, and pray, “Holy and gracious Father: In your infinite love you made us for
yourself..” God made us for herself, and that says to us that God made us
because God desired humanity’s presence in this beautiful, created world. Wow.
So,
if sometimes I sound like a jealous bystander to your lives, it is because I
am. I know that I want for you some of the grace that I have experienced in The
Church. I know that I want you to find and to be found by a God who has loved
me beyond all measure--- and taught me that I am not the sum of what I do. I am
a child of God, first a foremost, loved, forgiven and desired by God herself.
