She quickly followed her quick little sentence with an explanation--"No, I didn't say it in a rebellious way. I said it because I understood that there was more to our presence there than making jam. that jam was just a part of it and there was something deeper in that jam, in why I was in India"
Mathilde was sharing with me more of her life as we were walking home from the mass of the feast day of the Annunciation in Stephansdom tonight. She had been making jam today from the pounds of bananas, strawberries and watermelon that we received from the market today (St. Joseph is so good to us) and her brain was filled with jam.
But thats the secret. the secret is in the jam. Its the little things of normal life that are just teasers of the deeper reality they hold within.
It may have been jam--when she was in India, and this afternoon in our kitchen in Vienna--but that jam was filled with a whole lot of love and thus...we aren't here to make jam, we aren't here to make presentations, hold events, and design advertisements, we aren't here to cook and clean and type and read...we are here to live and are called to do so drenched in love, infusing our every action with love.
like Mary--she didn't become the Mother of God through the 'yes' we commemorate today in order to become pregnant, to flee to Egypt, to cook dinner for God, to stand under a blood stained cross. She said "yes" in order to love.
Love--equal parts fear and joy. Confusion and delightful surprise.
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Tomorrow Alina and I leave for Graz, Austria for three days of presentations in schools and a couple of community/prayer meetings. I entrust our trip and all the people we will meet, words we will speak, encounters we will have to your thoughts and prayers. May we speak with His words and bring His Presence.
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Another word about the girl I have come to hold dearly as a sister in community--Mathilde has discerned through a lot of time, experience, prayer and advice that she is not in fact called to a vocation with Heart's Home, so her second mission with Heart's Home will come to an end on May 2nd when she will travel back to Paris to discover there what the next step is that the Lord has in store for her open and willing and searching heart. It has been such a blessing to be in community with her, to share these past 5 months of learning and growing and hurting and loving--mercy. She is such a presence of mercy. Please keep her in your thoughts and prayers as well as she ventures on this next step in her life!
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