The Joy of Being Rescued

Welcome to Word for the Week, the series in which I:

share my experience of hearing God’s Word in Mass last weekend,
explore what I believe the Lord is calling me to do about that Word, and
ask how this Word might impact your life, as well.

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Welcome to Word for the Week! My word for the week is, “the joy of salvation.”

As always, I'd like to share how I felt God speaking to me at Mass last weekend, explore what the Lord wants me to do about it, and ask how this Word for the Week might apply to your life, as well. 

We sat in the very last pew this Sunday. (It’s my goal to arrive a little earlier for Mass this week!) Highlights: no one in our family had to leave church during Mass! There was a choir and a cantor. Afterward, we spoke with our pastor for a while and we met a couple of other young families. Additionally, my Word for the Week was considerably more upbeat than the week before!

Two weeks ago, the phrase that stood out from the reading was, “I shall not see happiness again.” It didn’t sound appealing. And although the word still applied positively to my life, this past Sunday’s psalm response offered a remedy to the problem of unhappiness: “I turn to you Lord, in time of trouble and you fill me with the joy of salvation.”

Over the last couple of weeks, we hit some unexpected financial troubles. (I shared about it last week). Over the past seven days, we were gratefully able to switch some things around and we feel more financially secure moving forward. Throughout the entire process, the Word of God reminded me of how wonderful it is to be rescued.

Not only in financial hardship but in emotional, spiritual, and physical matters, the experience of being rescued (salvation) has to produce more joy than if I didn’t need to be saved in the first place. I’m thinking of a recent moment when a tire popped on the way home from a late-night recording session. 

It was in the middle of a phone conversation in which I shared with a friend, “I feel uncomfortable when things are going too smoothly,” and then *pop* something was wrong with the vehicle! Thankfully, there was a nearby offramp, and I was able to exit the highway before the tire completely deflated. 

What a fiasco to make it back home! But it seemed hilarious that the Lord allowed it just as I said I don’t want to be too comfortable. And truly, I felt God’s love by being rescued. That love showed up by way of David, our neighbors, and our insurance company over the phone; plus the tow driver, a gas station worker, and a Lyft driver in person.

How do you need to be rescued this week? Are there any challenges that seem to have you bound up; have you come to a spiritual impasse in the first week of Lent? Perhaps like the leper who cried out to Jesus for healing in last week’s gospel, your problems are keeping you from community and closeness with others. Certainly, it seems we are living in a society of illness and isolation right now in the midst of the pandemic.

As we see modeled in the gospel, let’s pray together for healing. Lord, we trust you can heal us, if you wish. Please say to us, as you said to the leper, “I do will it. Be made clean.”

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