Patience

We had a python in our garden recently, again. After a tense search, I discerned the python lying motionless, poised above our bird feeding basket.

It remained there, motionless but with its head and neck coiled like a spring, for 36 hours. Then the position was changed for a while, followed by a return to the same post for another 12 hour vigil. The kerfuffle we heard in the middle of the night was probably the demise of a plump item on the food chain. It was gone the next morning.

As patient as a python, I thought.

Idly thinking about the prey of the python, I eventually pondered about sudden death. Just like it could happen to a plump pigeon, a garish lorikiet or a cautious possum, dining at a well known food spot , as they had for years…, so could it happen to anyone, even me!

But what about God’s plan for me? (Many years ago, a young Irish priest told me in confidence that God had a special plan for me).

Sooo …. now I am on shaky ground all of a sudden! Do I doubt this special plan and thereby risk losing my special connection with big G? Will it thrust me back into the pool of the ordinary people without special connections who like plump possums are subject to sudden death by python or squashing by runaway steamrollers or succumbing to coronavirus or … just choking on a potato…?

It is a fundamental, elemental question which tests faith and defies intellect and … I can hear Freddy Mercury singing Who wants to live forever? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Jtpf8N5IDE

Take this cup away from me, I am not brave enough to make the call. I have little faith in humans and their versions of God, yet the very idea of God is appealing and comforting.

Why is sacrifice necessary to gain Paradise? Why can we not just believe and shutoff the questions raised by our mind?

Sorry this randomly took its own direction … quite awkward actually. But that how it rolls sometimes…