Our God is an awesome God, He reigns from heaven above, With wisdom, power, and love, Our God is an awesome God. Those song lyrics went through my head as I read the first reading today. Moses telling the Israelites just how awesome and unique their God, THE God, is. How he intervened on behalf of a chosen nation, something no other “god” had done before. Flip to the second reading and Paul is telling us about how intimate our relationship is with God, through Jesus Christ. He is reminding everyone that we have received the Holy Spirit, a spirit of adoption and not of fear. That we are brothers with Christ and sons and daughters of God himself. So much so that we can cry out Abba, or loosely translated daddy, a childlike reference to our father in heaven. All of this building up to the Gospel reading today where Christ tells us he will be with us always, until the end of the age. Man, how can anyone not just stand in awe of God and Christ after reading through this, let alone experiencing it like the disciples did. Yet, the verse that stuck out to me in the Gospel reading was “When they all saw him, they worshiped, but they doubted.” What?!?! How could they doubt him? Well, they doubted him because they were human, just like you and I are human. Our spirit can’t always overpower our flesh. We are weak and fallen. But if they doubted, how did the disciples go out and do all the wonderful things we read about in the rest of the new testament? Luck? I don’t think so. It was through the power of God, the Holy Spirit they would soon receive, working in them to guide them and lead them along the path God had laid out for them. But if God had laid out a path for them, it was easy for them, right? God was making them do it? Wrong. They still had to choose to allow God’s will to be done in their life. And I think they chose that path because they loved God and loved Christ, so even though they doubted for a moment, their belief won in the end. It’s ok to doubt sometimes, I know I do. As long as you don’t blindly accept the doubt, it very well may be God calling you to know him deeper by praying, reading, and working to resolve that doubt. There will be ups and downs in life, mountain top moments and valleys of despair we all go through, but we need to keep balance through all of that, to remember the mountain top experiences when we walk through the valley, to give us hope so our doubt doesn’t win. And also to remember trudging through the valley when we have the mountain top experience so we can appreciate the mountain top experience even more. In all of this, we need to remember God, remember that we are beloved children of a father who only wants the best for us. Who, just like the disciples, is calling each of us down a path that will make us happier than we could ever be, left on our own. A God who loves us so much he sent his son to die so we could be with him. Who wants us to call him daddy, to look at him with childlike wonder, to let go of our fleshly desires and grab hold of him. To know that he will be with us, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, until the end of the age.

Pax Christi,
John Mihalko