Our dreams are too small.
Throughout all of history, God has acted beyond our wildest expectations. The stories of the Old Testament are pretty familiar to most of us. Exodus alone is full of mind-blowing acts of God. God calls down 10 plagues, He parts the Red Sea so Israel can leave behind slavery in Egypt. Throughout the desert wanderings God miraculously provides manna for the Israelites to eat. Moses strikes a rock and water flows from it. And that’s just getting started.
The pages of the Bible are filled with so many great and seemingly unbelievable stories – talking donkeys, giants slain, enemy armies defeated, lepers healed, the deaf hear, the mute speak, the blind see. Even death itself is defeated in Jesus’ resurrection.
The obstacles we face today are really not much different than the ones we read about in the Scriptures. And yet somehow, knowing all the ways that God has moved throughout history, we still lack an imagination for how God might continue to provide for us in difficult circumstances today.
The prophet Jeremiah tells us: “For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope” (Jeremiah 29:11). Imagine how our behavior might change if we really believed that, what the world would look like if we lived like it was true.
Rather than living in fear of further decline or making the wrong decision, we should boldly trust that God has the solution to our every problem. The fact that He has promised that “the gates of Hell will not prevail” (Matthew 16) against the Church should give us confidence, hope and inspiration. We often hear these words and prepare to hunker down, to sustain an attack from the enemy rather than go on the offensive knowing God will provide for us.
In the midst of what has been a hard time in our archdiocese, Mass attendance went up (even if a slight increase across the archdiocese as a whole), the numbers of those choosing to be Catholic increased at least 15% this year and parishes across our area are making efforts to evangelize in new and creative ways. These are things that many didn’t imagine were possible.
Pope Francis has spoken about faith as not merely gazing upon Jesus, but rather a participation in His way of seeing (Lumen Fidei 18). Think of all the things that God can do that we can’t currently imagine because we see through human eyes instead of the eyes of faith. What is our dream for the impact that our parishes can have on our neighborhoods? What are the mountains that God can move in our own lives? Are our dreams as big as God’s?
It remains true that there are no easy answers or quick fixes as we try to respond to a generation of decline in participation and belief in the Church across the United States. But rather than despairing, let’s begin to exercise an imagination for evangelization that exceeds our wildest dreams of what is possible, because in Christ all things are possible.