Dear Readers,
The Chicago Blackhawks have reclaimed the Stanley Cup after 49 years.
B. A. Barackus is coming back to life after a quarter-century.
Soon I will be forty years of age.
I am a little overwhelmed.
Your unworthy servant needs to retire from the world for a while.
Love remains the same. May it please God, I will return to this space.
Let us hurry toward heaven together by faithful prayer. Adieu.
God is holy. By definition.
God.
What is God?
Holy.
He is holy.
He is infinitely, terrifyingly holy.
He is won-derfully, magni-ficently holy.
We Christians aspire to holiness. We desire the holiness of God. We want to share in His glory. We want to be holy as our Father in heaven is holy.
Are we presumptuous? After all, how can we be holy—we who subsist on the flesh of dead animals, and sometimes produce bad smells and bad words, and spend a lot of time thinking about ice cream and professional sports and a lot of other things that don’t exactly pertain to holiness? How can we hope to be holy?
When crabbers pull their pots from the water, they quickly identify the crabs that are about to molt. The color on the edge of the backfins is different.
Crabs that are outgrowing their shells slip out of the back of the old hard shell. They emerge as delectible little creatures that can be eaten whole.
There is no greater pleasure on earth than to devour an entire fried soft-shell crab in a few bites, consuming every cell of the organism in a chomping frenzy of bliss.
But supervising crabs that are about to molt requires great vigilance. The crabber must check his tanks every couple of hours and remove a newly emerged soft-shell crab for immediate refrigeration. Otherwise, the other crabs in the tank will cannibalize the defenseless one, or its shell will quickly harden.
So the faithful crabber interrupts his sleep like a monk to keep watch over the tank of molting ‘peelers.’ He does it so that that you and I can go to a restaurant and order soft-shell crab.
Yes, there are many things wrong with this world. But let’s not take the good things for granted.
Father Mark White Blog 