-Fr. John Roche, SDB
Have you ever gotten close to a victory and then stopped trying? Have you ever prepared long and hard for a special test only to skip the test or fail miserably? I think there are moments in all of our lives when we nearly reach a summit only to stumble at the last moment. It is a confusing and frustrating experience.
I spent some years at a boarding school for boys in Canada. The boys sent to us there were last chance cases. The courts, social services or the school boards had given up on so many of these young people and the only option left to them was to come to our boarding school. What is interesting about this is that there was really no special education or service offered at the school besides our own persistent presence and our desire to never give up on these children for whom so many systems had no patience.
The boys in this school were supposed to be students in grades seven, eight and nine —what we refer to as middle school. However, these boys ranged in age from 12 to 20, because many of them had failed out or dropped out of a grade more than once.
The work was not easy. It was a job that demanded attention 24/7, as they say. We only had Saturdays off to recuperate and prepare for another week. Yet as tough and grueling as this work seemed, it was the most rewarding experience of my ministerial life. It was the one assignment in my religious life where I witnessed real change in young lives. The persistence of our efforts and our love proved to be an amazing remedy to many very chaotic young lives.
We had our difficulties, to say the least. Not every young person responded to these efforts. Some seemed beyond anyone’s reach to help them find meaning or a sense of order in their worlds. There were some who had seemed anything but the threat by which they been labeled by some system or other. And then there were those whose problems were deeper than anything we could handle. But overall, the experience of creating a safe home and family for these children paid off immensely.
There was one recurring phenomenon, however. There were boys whose lives turned completely around. They went from not caring about school or life to discover amazing academic and social success. It was a joy to watch these young people seize life for all they could wrestle out of it and to find success. However, many of these young people would soar until the last few months before they would graduate from our school. As the reality hit them that they would be going out into the world and back to systems that rejected them, many of them would begin to deliberately fail. They seemed to go into a “self-destruct mode.” Most of this was unconscious, actually. Oftentimes these desperate young people would even turn on those who helped them most, making those last months very painful. Thankfully, the pattern repeated itself so often, that the teachers, Salesians and staff members knew what to expect and redoubled their efforts to assure the young people that our care for them did not come with conditions of success.
In some cases, those efforts would be enough to turn the situation around and permit some of the boys to graduate with success and confidence. In other cases, we had to stand by them and help them deal with the transition they would face inevitably, no matter their level of success. The bigger issue was to help them deal with life as it came at them.
As I reflect on this, I can recall many moments in my own life when I had operated — also unconsciously — with a self-destruct mode. I can trace this tendency in many dimensions of my life from taking care of myself, dieting, exercise and all those regiments that become more and more difficult with age. Yet, even in my spiritual life, I can recall similar moments of giving up or giving in. I have found myself wondering if I would ever conquer a particular habit that was unhealthy or improve my own prayer life with various practices to overcome laziness or distraction. So many times I have thrown away months of effort believing that my end goal would never arrive.
As a priest, I have heard so many confessions of persons convinced they will never overcome some sinful behaviors and attitudes and they would ask what purpose confessing once more could bring after so many failed attempts. Why not give up and be resigned to sinful behavior?
I wonder how many marriages or friendships hit the rocks and end abruptly believing the worst? Do some couples give up before they even try to reconcile fearing that failure is inevitable? And what about job performance? How easy it can be to fall to the level of the lowest common denominator rather than push our performance for hard work, commitment and honesty. More and more it seems that commitment, recommitment and pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps are virtues that are falling by the wayside.
Looking back, it causes me to pause and remember that our God came back to our defense and recommitted to the covenant countless times. As our God, He reminded us that we are a special people dear to Him. Even St. Paul wondered if he would ever overcome some of his greatest weaknesses only to be assured by Christ that it is in his weakness that the strength and power of God can operate. This, it seems, is the MO of our God. God chooses the weak to overcome the powerful. God chooses the least qualified to be messengers of truth and conversion.
The next time you sense a self-destruct mode creeping into your MO, remember that God can use failure, weakness and even outright sinfulness to accomplish amazing things. Jesus tells us, “Fear is useless. What is needed is trust.” Let us, then, depend upon the power of our God and plunge ahead in faith. Our commitments, our efforts, our relationships and even our successes depend more upon this trust in God than in any personal effort we can make.