What Is it you Want, Exactly?

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.