My eyes have been opened
A while back someone told me she prayed and received this word for me: God uses distress to open their eyes (Job 36:15).
When I first read it, nothing stuck out, but now it leaps off the page. My eyes have been opened, and it is the distress of others that is before my eyes.
Shortly after I received that word, a number of us in the dorm (MH members and guests live in dormitories) had the flu, and others were on a three-day retreat. This meant that more of us than usual were drinking tea or coffee and eating in the dorm. Though we are supposed to pick up after ourselves, there were lots of dishes—dirty, of course—and small, half-filled containers of milk lying around.
One morning, the person whose job it was to clean the “cozy corner,” the place in the dorm where we eat and sit around together, almost cried. There was so much for her to pickup and so very little time to do it all.
I happened to be there when this happened and realized that one container of almost sour milk and several of the dirty dishes were mine. As she began to tell our house mother her frustrations, I suddenly realized that my disorder had fallen on her shoulders. My laziness had directly affected someone I loved very much.
Then a few days after that, just before prayers, my house mother told me that if I did not leave quickly for the chapel, I would be late, and she was quite emphatic about it. When I got back from prayers, during which I had prayed that I would not enter into self-condemnation or bitterness toward my housemother, she came over to talk to me.
She apologized that she had been, to use her words, “abrupt and hard,” but said that she had been carrying the comments of a couple of people who had been finding my recent habit of lateness difficult.
Again, I realized the same thing. My disorder had fallen on the shoulders of someone I loved.
These two incidents started me thinking. Where does my disorder go? On whose shoulders does it fall? I almost shudder at the thought of who it is who is carrying fallout from my really grievous actions.
My faith tells me that it falls onto the shoulders of Jesus, onto the Body of Christ. But we are all part of the Mystical Body of Christ. So my sins fall on some person’s shoulders as well. That person carries it and maybe suffers because of it. My sins, even my most private sins, affect others. This realization was certainly an eye-opener.
It is all very simple. What I do affects others, for good or for ill. Which do I want to choose?
