You are what you eat

At the end of August just gone, I pulled my first big crop of rhubarb from my garden. I decided to put my efforts into jam making not being a great lover of the stewed kind. Having pestered my Mum and Aunty May for their empty jars, and having researched all possible recipes from the internet, I set to work. I now marvel at anyone who finds jam making easy. Clearly not to the manor born, I laboriously heated the 14 pots, measured out my sugar, chopped and diced the rhubarb and began cooking. Several cold plate tests later, I figured that I had got the magic consistency and set about pouring the jam into the pots. I couldn’t wait to see my own jam, plentiful and delicious. I lined up the fourteen pots on the counter and despite much scraping and re-reading of the instructions, I managed to fill one and a half jars. What I hadn’t put in, was certainly not going to come out.

                In my life, it has taken me quite some time to realise that what I put into the life around me will most certainly come out. When I find peace in God, then sometimes peacefulness comes out from me. Equally if angry words come from me, then impatience, intolerance and insecurity have certainly been put in. The disciples argue this week about who is the greatest among them. And as St. Paul says in his letter, the disputes we encounter often arise from battles within ourselves, the desires to have and to be powerful. If I seek to be as Jesus wishes me to be, then what I fill myself with will most likely not serve what I desire, or what I feel but it will serve the fullness of my soul and my deepest desires.

                True greatness is about making peace with our lack of need of virtually anything else except God. And true greatness utterly transforms the lives of those who experience it. No-one remains untouched by the actions and words of the one who truly recognises the worth of another and acts or speaks for that worth without thought to their own safety or reputation. The greatness of which Jesus speaks this week is not about filling ourselves but about emptying ourselves. Our destiny is in our hands, but not in the ways we imagine. We are infinitely small in this universe of ours and suffer the slings and arrows of unpredictable forces and violence. And yet we are ultimately unique and infinitely worth-ful. How we respond in love to the shakiness and imbalance and to the injustice and the horrors of our lives defines our greatness. We can seek to fill ourselves or to empty ourselves.

                And so if life is a series of jam jars and I seek to fill only my own with self serving ingredients, then I will probably yield very little. But if I seek to fill those of others around me from a place of true free love, then I will realise that my own jars are already full.   

Ms. Helen Walsh.

1st October, 200aaa6