Deal with him always

I MEAN, deal with Christ always. In every situation, whether it be considered good or bad, favorable to us or not, let’s never forget that we have to deal with Christ.

To be sure, he is always around, ever solicitous of our needs. He is a living and loving God, not just a historical figure nor a mere figment of our imagination. He is actually intervening in our life to lead us back to him and to show us how to understand and react to all the events and situations of our life.

This is a truth, an underlying aspect of reality that we need to capture quickly and continually. We need to correspond to it accordingly.

This obviously requires a working faith on our part, for without it we would just be guided by our senses and our human estimations that, no matter how brilliant, cannot cope with the all the mysteries of our life.

To be sure, this faith in the abiding presence and intervention of God in our life is not a gratuitous, baseless affirmation. That there is God can readily be attested to by the very things we see around and the things that we have inside ourselves.

They all point to the existence of God who is the very foundation of the existence of everything and everyone else. Nothing can exist without him. And he is no inert God, indifferent to us and to the world. We are the work of his hands, a project of his love, and we just cannot be created for nothing other than to be with God.

If we just would give a little more time to look more closely into this truth of faith, we can conclude that our entire life and existence is bound always with God who, besides creating us, came to us as man, Jesus Christ, to re-create us after we messed up his original plan for us through our sin.

We need to be guided by our faith, by the truth about God being our Creator and Father who loves us and actually directs us every step of the way. We may still commit errors in discerning his will and ways for us, but as long as we put our faith and trust in him, we would surely by plodding the path that he invisibly traces for us.

That is why there is always hope even in the ugliest and tragic situation we may put ourselves in. On our part, the ideal situation is for us to act out our faith, and to develop the proper attitude and practice of living our whole life with God through Christ in the Holy Spirit.

We have to learn to look, find and love Christ in every situation of our life. We need to realize more deeply and abidingly that we can always find Christ in everything and in everyone.

That’s because Christ is the God who became man, who identifies himself with each one of us in all our possible situations, and who shows us the way of how to understand, react and behave in all these situations. He is “the way, the truth and the life.”

Putting it bluntly, we need to deal with Christ in every situation we find ourselves in. We have to look for him in everything and in everyone. We have to find him there. We have to deal with him there. This is what is proper in our life.

We should never think that there are certain things and moments in our life where Christ is irrelevant or has nothing to say. Dealing with Christ always does not make us a stranger in the world, helpless in worldly ways. Remember that he himself told us to be shrewd like serpents even as we should also be innocent as doves.

We have to overcome our ignorance, resistance and awkwardness in carrying out this truly fundamental duty of ours to deal with Christ always. We actually have been given all the means for us to realize this ideal.

Christ has left us with his living word, his sacraments, especially the Holy Eucharist that contains his very body and blood. He has established his Church, endowing it with all the structure and power so that his presence and redemptive work with us is perpetuated till the end of time.

We have to understand that unless we deal with Christ in everything and in everyone, we would be facing life improperly, inadequately and dangerously. We would just be on our own, a rather funny anomaly.