It's always time to start again

Thursday in the Second Week in Easter

Acts 5: 27-33; Jn 3:31-36

They say that the basketball champion Michael Jordan was thrown out of his basketball team at college and that Albert Einstein flunked his maths exam at school. I am not sure truth in these particular details but I am sure that these two stars succeeded in what they did because they persevered despite moments of failure.

I am struck by a verse in today's reading:

"You have filled Jerusalem with your teaching"

These disciples preached the word of God just 50 days after the dramatic Easter events. I do not think that they were refined orators and yet, they managed to fill Jerusalem with their teaching. The reason? They did not give up, and whenever they were stopped from preaching and arrested, they would continue to preach as though nothing happened.

Too often we give up when challenges come our way. I am not referring only to failures in our professional life, which somehow we seem to manage quite well. I am referring, rather to failures in our spiritual life. When we suddenly become aware of our sinfulness, when we realise that we have failed someone who loves us, when we get discouraged at the lack of progress in our spiritual life. What do we do often do? We just quit. We think that it is impossible to move on, we almost think that Christian vocation is not for us.

It is our perseverance in our spiritual life that makes us bear fruit, for that is not our fruit but the fruit of the Holy Spirit. When the going is easy there is no merit, just as walking downhill is hardly any exercise when compared to jugging uphill.

God does not look for results in our spiritual life, so why should we? What God really looks for is our perseverance and our determination to start again whenever we fail. To start again is probably the best sign that we are taking our faith seriously and that we have started to understand a bit more the mystery of Christ's resurrection from the dead in our life.