For the love of God: Kate McNally’s Thought for the Week
‘These are not my children, they’re God’s children.’
This pandemic has shown that many of us need love to drive out the fear around us. We all need love to quench the fires of fear and dread, and the grief we feel for parts of our lives that are lost to us. How can we provide this for others when the love we need is drowned out by our own fear? How can we wake the faith we need to do God’s work, to drive out fear with love when our own reservoirs feel so depleted?
We can remember that the love that comes from us is exhaustible – finite. But the love that comes through us is infinite. The prayer of Francis of Assisi reminds us that we can be a channel of God’s love for others. It’s up to us to keep that channel open, to not clog it up.
It’s not only our family and friends who need our love. Everyone we see carries the burden of these past months, in different ways and with differing levels of success.
I see this most clearly with strangers who need loving support. For the past five years we have worked with people on the move. Not in large numbers, normally just one or two at a time. They come to us having suffered all of the hellish things we hear about on the migrant routes. We see people who have escaped genocide, crossed the Sahara and been enslaved in Libya. They have lost friends crossing the Mediterranean, then crossed all the borders in Europe to get to Belgium, and we support them in this step of their journey. And then, they move on.
It’s hard to see them go into the Channel, where we hope they reach England. And yet I’ve come to know that these are not my children, they’re God’s children, and they’re in God’s hands. They always have been.
For the part of their journey that is here in Belgium, we are God’s hands, and then we send them on. They will stay in God’s hands and they will stay God’s children. We just do our part here. Sometimes we can send them on to God’s hands in the form of other Quakers. Always as God’s children.
It’s an important part of my Quaker faith to bring God’s hands here to people who need it and just to know that it is good enough. That’s all I can do. I can’t follow them. I can’t protect them, I can’t guarantee them success. I have to release them back into those hands that brought them here.
In the same way, I think it is also important to remember that our suffering loved ones are also God’s children. They may be on loan to us, but they are ultimately God’s. We channel God’s love to them, and then let them go.
It is required that we do awake our faith – our faith that we will find the resources we need, that we will find the people who can help with the work when we need them, and that we will have the support we need to help our loved ones on to the next part of their journey. That we will be able to follow Jesus in the work he began: love one another.
Kate is from Belgium & Luxembourg Meeting.
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