Small Success Thursday...on Thursday!

Will wonders never cease? 

It helps that I'm home sick today.  I can do three things. Groan, sleep and occasionally comment on something in social media. 

However, if I don't post SST today, it won't be because I didn't have time, only a lack of will.   Here's today's Small Success Thursday.  There are times when I think about stopping this weekly exercise of counting one's blessings.  It doesn't seem to generate much of a written response. 

Part of me, the egotistical part, wants that affirmation.  But as I told my mom recently, too much affirmation for me, is like alcohol.  I get spiritually drunk on it, and fail to keep growing.  Simcha Fisher wrote a great piece,  there's a value in the waiting to be healed, even if we do not fully recognize it, and I knew, that's what I feel sometimes when there aren't many responses to Small Success Thursday.  Where is everyone?  Isn't a sign of the Holy Spirit, community?  Am I just tooting my own horn? Does it come across as me bragging about my life? Does it come across as smug about reality?  Which lead to the question...why do you do this?  For yourself?  If so, why? 

I write it to keep track of life, to remember all the good that happens,  even when battling a stomach bug.   I write it to remind myself, all of life is a gift, and that even suffering, while not "fixable," is redeemable.   (To quote another wise woman, Leticia Adams).  God redeems our suffering, which is very different from fixing it.  However, that redemption requires one key element, our cooperation.    When you spend the day in bed, cooperation seems like a bit much to ask.  My sufferings are nothing compared to anyone else's, but I'm just as willing to whine at God, "Fix this." over the small things as the big.  I'm very good at nagging God. 

Then I read Pope Francis' work a Letter Placuit Deo To the Bishops of the Catholic Church On Certain Aspects of Christian Salvation.  Pope Francis takes on the two modern heresies which are merely repackaging of two of the oldest,  Pelagianism and Gnosticism. 

Most of us have a cursory knowledge of the second one.  The body is innately bad, and all redepmtion is a spiritual act, a divorcing of the soul from the body.  If so, there would be no need of the ressurection. Why trouble us with new bodies, if bodies are themselves, unnecessary and innately of no worth.  Why become man if being man were not necessary.  God could have shown himself as a giant head, like in that horrible movie Startrek V, and the question would be, "What does God need with a starship/body?" Answer, nothing at all if gnosticism is true.   Fortunately, it's not true even if right now, I know my body feels bad and I'd personally like a divorce for as long as it feels this way. 

Which brings us to the second heresy.  Being sick has an advantage in terms of insight. I cannot will myself better. I can only wait and work towards being well.  But I cannot make myself healed no matter how much I wish it. Pelagianism asserts we can (absent God's grace) be good, be whole, be who we are called to be.  I've only begun to delve into the piece by the Pope, and can barely spell the term without double checking, but I do get the good person who does not believe in God, does not know they receive God's grace.  They receive it nontheless because God loves all his children and wants them to know through all the graces of life, His love.  He's pouring out all the graces of the Universe in an attempt to win over each of our hearts. 

So I go back to the question...and the answer is of course, I will write SST, if only to remind myself to be grateful to God for everything.  (I'll still ask God, could you make me better soon please, this is not fun).