He uses our hands

In my office, I have a number of pictures; one in particular is one that I took when I was at this small church on the Sea of Galilee. The church is called the Church of the Primacy of Peter. It is purported to be the place that Christ cooked breakfast for the Apostles after the resurrection and he asked Peter if he loved him and then told him to “feed my sheep.” Jesus was sending the Apostles out to continue the work that He had started. Jesus continues to do the same today and asks us to go out into the world and feed his sheep. Attached to the side of this church was a small plaque and it has a quote on it that states: “The deeds and miracles of Jesus are not actions of the past. Jesus is waiting for those who are still prepared to take risks at His word because they trust His power utterly.” I took a picture of this quote and framed it because I thought that it was quite meaningful. 

We sometimes think that the things that Jesus did happened only in the past. That He was just a good teacher who told us to be nice to each other and that was it. While He does not have His own physical hands on this world anymore, He uses our hands to continue to perform many different miracles. The miraculous actions are still through the power of Christ, but they are also through the working of other people. Just look at what can happen through people who have the courage to follow Christ simply because they trust in Him. 

There are literally thousands of accounts of the saints doing wonderful things because they love Christ. One of the great examples of this is through Agnes, a simple Albanian sister who wanted to serve the poorest of the poor in the streets of India. Mother Teresa was someone who could have continued her relatively comfortable life as a nun with the Sisters of Loreto. She could have continued to be the principal of Saint Mary’s school in Calcutta, but she heard her “call within a call” as she called it. Instead, she convinced her superior to allow her to leave the order and begin a new one. She felt that God was calling her to serve the poorest of the poor those who were the “unwanted, unloved, and uncared for” and she did. It took a lot of courage to go out into those streets to serve those who no one else wanted to care for. Mother Teresa trusted in the power of Christ working through her and still worked miracles. 

There are many other things in life that are not easy to do and we may not have the strength ourselves to follow through with them, but Christ’s deeds and actions are not only things that happened when He bodily walked the earth 2,000 years ago, the miracles still happen each and every day. Are we willing to take risks for Christ because we trust in His power and not simply our own?

God bless,
Fr. Ken