Traffic lights and lotto

       I don't want to seem like Obi-Wan Kenobi but we all have enormous power at our fingertips.  As people of faith, of any kind, we are tapping in on our limitless potential and cosmic inheritance that is ours as creations of God. The Apostles get a taste of it in today's passage from the Gospel of Mark when Jesus has the sea calm and the winds cease. Jesus notes in other passages like Matthew 17:20 that if we had the faith the size of a mustard seed we could have mountains topple into the sea. That's news!

       On whatever level we are in touch with our inheritance or such abilities, we often fall far short of what it might be used for. I can approach a traffic light and will it to stay green making my route clearer.  Is that what our power is for?  Traffic control seems almost infantile, laughable, misguided.  You might ask, if we really have the power then why aren't so many of us millionaires? Doesn't almost every person who buys a lotto ticket have a conversation with themselves and/or God fervently asking to win?  I could do so much good Lord if you let me win! I guess that's the rub right there. On some level we know when we are asking for something really worth asking for and it isn't magical. We doesn't just twitch our nose like Samantha or cast a spell like they seem to do in Hogwarts. When we ask for peace or to find that special someone or for a cure to an illness what we are perhaps really asking for  is for us to have the courage to make peace; for us to love ourselves so we can also love someone else; not so much for a cure but strength to see us through whatever is before us and let God be there with us no matter what. And God is. God always is with us.

        I may play funny games with traffic signals but I know I can ask God for anything and She will abide me as much as I follow through on my end and ask for something reasonable. Perhaps that is the toughest part, what is reasonable and loving? 

        

Mark 4:35-41

 On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, ‘Let us go across to the other side.’ And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great gale arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, ‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’ He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?’ And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’