By Sarah Raad
Very often my children catch the bus to school and very often they catch the bus home from school.
In the afternoons I collect them from the bus stop near our home. Though it is a very short walk from the bus stop to our home, I like to collect them as a way of showing them that I care about them and can try my best to relieve them of some of the stress of their day.
The bus stop is located at my local parish church. And so I will park my car at the church and usually try to duck inside for a moment or two to greet Our Lord.
I love that quiet time inside the church and I am very lucky to have the opportunity to visit the church during the silence of the day.
After my little baby died, before he was even born, I was so overcome with grief that I turned my back on God. This did not mean that I stopped receiving the sacraments. I continued to receive them. This did not mean that I stopped believing in God and in heaven or hell. I continued to believe in these things.
However, I stopped knowing my Beloved. In other words, I spent my time berating God in my anger and convincing myself that my God was a terrible God who wanted to harm me and hurt me and cause me pain. I convinced myself that God was playing with me as a cat does a mouse and that He was deliberately sending me badness to harm me and had no regard at all for my happiness or joy.
For a long and dark time, I experienced a spiritual dryness so intense that I experienced a complete absence of love for God. I considered Him a terrible Master. I was like the wicked servant in the Gospel who was afraid of his master and hid what had been entrusted to him.
“He also who had received the one talent came forward, saying, ‘Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here, you have what is yours.’ But his master answered him, ‘You wicked and slothful servant! You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I scattered no seed? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest. So take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matt 25:24-30).
After this time, many years later, I experienced a conversion so profound that it changed everything in my life. By grace and no merit of my own, the Holy Spirit came into my soul and inspired me to know that God had not taken anything from me. He had given me the opportunity to hope that my child was in heaven and a saint. I was not robbed by God, but rewarded by Him.
I remember the moment in the morning. I remember where I was standing inside my home. I remember holding the mop in my hand in the quiet morning light and bursting into tears because the experience of God’s love was so great that it overcame me. I remember knowing that I had nothing to fear.
And it is not that I have been unafraid since. I, like many people, struggle to have faith and trust in God’s goodness. But I have found a peace in God even through my own weakness.
I have prayed for people and they have prayed for me and God has answered those prayers with peace.
And sometimes, in the quiet of the church in the middle of the day, I can stop and adore my God, when there is nobody around and the place is dark and silent. And it seems to me, in those moments, that I am more beloved than any other creature that God has ever made.
How awesome is my Lord and God, King of endless glory…
Sarah Raad is a wife, mother, daughter, sister, and friend who writes at the blog, “Here. At the Foot of the Cross” (footofthecross.com.au).
