Friends, the following is a reflection from the book, Forgive Everyone Everything by Gregory Boyle, S.J., Founder and Director of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, California. Fr. Boyle is a recent recipient of the Medal of Freedom. Jayne and I agreed that this was to be the theme of this season’s letter as it has been jumpstarting conversations with those we meet with in recent weeks.

Some people say, “God is good, and God has a plan for you.”  I believe that God is good but also that God is too busy loving me to have a plan for me.  Like a caring parent, God receives our childlike painting of a tree – usually an unrecognizable mess – and delights in it. God doesn’t hand it back and say “Come back when it looks more like a tree” or tell us how to improve it.  God simply delights in us.  Like the kid at probation camp after confession: “You mean you just sealed my record?”.  The God who always wants to clean the slate is hard to believe. Yet the truth about God is that God is too good to be true.  And whenever human beings bump into something too good to be true, we decide it’s not true.

In correspondence with a priest in Ireland, Jackie Kennedy wrote that she felt bitter toward God after the assassination of her husband. “How could God let this happen?” she asked.  But God wasn’t in the Texas School Book Depository, aiding and abetting. God was – and is – in the heartbreak and in the insight born of sadness, and in the arms that wrap around our grief. I have felt this every time a kid is gunned down. Or when you have to lay off three hundred of your workers because you can’t meet payroll.  Or when you’re given a cancer diagnosis.  Such things don’t shake your faith – they shape it.

Some things are random and other things are meant to be in our control.  So, God is with me when “shit happens” and God is rooting for me when I need to decide things.  And I’m okay with that.  I don’t need God to be in charge of my life.  I only need God to be at the center of it. 

Gregory Boyle, S.J., Forgive Everyone Everything, p. 97

Take what is helpful and leave the rest. Blessings

Rich and Jayne