Wrapped in God’s Love
We often experience our lives as divided.
There is our spiritual life—prayer, worship, Scripture, silence, and our relationship with God. And there is our ordinary life—work, family, responsibilities, relationships, worries, tiredness, and the many things that occupy our days.
Sometimes we keep these two worlds apart. Sometimes we try to balance them, giving time to prayer while attending to everything else. At other times, we may think of the spiritual as something higher, something above the concerns of our earthly life.
But perhaps our relationship with God is deeper than simply separating, balancing, or rising above.
Perhaps the spiritual wraps around the corporeal.
God’s presence surrounds our ordinary human existence and gives it meaning. Our spiritual life is not meant to remain somewhere apart from our daily experience. It slowly enters the way we speak, work, love, suffer, forgive, and care for others.
This becomes very concrete in today’s Gospel.
Peter asks Jesus, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive?” Jesus answers, “Not seven times but seventy-seven times.” He then tells the parable of the servant who receives an enormous debt of mercy but refuses to extend that mercy to another.
The servant had received forgiveness, but that forgiveness had not yet wrapped around his life.
And perhaps this is where the Gospel touches us.
We can pray for God’s mercy, receive forgiveness, and experience God’s love—and yet still struggle with the person who has hurt us.
That is where our spiritual life becomes real.
Forgiveness leaves the realm of ideas and enters our relationships. Mercy becomes a choice. Love becomes patience. Faith becomes the way we respond when someone disappoints us.
The spiritual begins to touch the corporeal.
God does not ask us to escape our ordinary lives in order to find Him. He meets us within them.
He is present in our homes, our workplaces, our conversations, our wounds, our responsibilities, our joys, and even in the difficult relationships we would rather avoid.
Perhaps the question is not simply, “How is my spiritual life?”
Perhaps the deeper question is:
“Has God’s love wrapped itself around the way I live?”
Because when we allow ourselves to be surrounded by God’s mercy, that mercy slowly begins to reach the people around us.
We discover that we do not have two lives—one spiritual and one material.
We have one life, lived entirely within God’s presence.
And perhaps this is what Jesus invites us to discover:
Let your prayer become your life.
Let your faith enter your relationships.
Let God’s mercy wrap around everything you are.
Let your whole life be wrapped in God’s love.
Prayer
Lord, wrap my life in Your love.
When I am joyful, keep me close.
When I am wounded, hold me in Your mercy.
When I fail, help me begin again.
And having received Your love,
teach me to share it with others.
Amen.
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