What is it that touches you lately, moves your heart, opens your eyes? What restlessness or glimpse of your world, change of view? You know how it is, maybe, when a friend spends half a year helping to rebuild a rural community in Guatemala, and she’s different now. It’s her story, of course. But it changes how she fits back home now, how she connects to her old friends. And you wonder what she sees. You wonder about your own blind spots.
What can happen to shift our own story, to see in a new way? A risky commitment; crossing a boundary? Or it could be the revolutionary discovery of being loved, being valued even as a sinner, cherished by your spouse or a friend, or God. To be known! Light comes in, a grace.
We test such a truth by telling it over in our own words. Like the man in the Gospel. That’s the leap of faith: speaking for yourself, telling what happened to calm your worries, or shift your values, or open your eyes. What a moment, to know we are different now! What a test, when life calls on us to explore that change, to live it.
And then to let Jesus know. “I believe you now. I know you.”
—Fr. Richard Bollman, S.J., a Jesuit of the Chicago-Detroit province, is currently engaged in pastoral ministries in Cincinnati and at the Jesuit Center in Milford, OH.