Whose Side I’m Fighting For

It is hard to say or to know what exactly matters in my line of work.  The lines get so blurry.  I wish sometimes I could lay my head on the pillow at the end of the day and have a sense of knowing for sure that the Kingdom made its way, even just one more inch, into the city of Chicago through something I did, something I participated in.  But it doesn’t work like that.

More often than not, it is messy dance of back and forth.  It is ambiguous victories mixed with incomplete failures.  I don’t know half the time whose side I’m fighting for – and often it feels like my efforts are doing more harm for the Kingdom than good.

Why all this self-doubt?  We’re getting toward the end of Lent, and I realize each year that no matter how much purging and confession and buffeting I do to hone myself closer to the Living God, there is simply no way to transcend the fact that I’m a person who will also be mixed with the spiritual warfare going on all around us. At times I pick up the flag of the enemy and run in the opposite direction, hell bent on destroying everything I desperately want to see accomplished in God’s work here in Chicago.

Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement once said:

“What we do is very little.  But it is like the little boy with a few loaves and fishes.  Christ took that little and increased it.  He will do the rest.  What we do is so little that we may seem to be constantly failing.  But so did he fail.  He met with apparent failure on the Cross.  But unless the seeds fall into the earth and die, there is no harvest.”

Being a missionary isn’t a neat and tidy job, but then again, Jesus had a fine time living in ambiguity and failure.  That brings me peace.

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