“God Loves Them More Than You Do”
Father Peter Fitzgibbons
September 10 – 11, 2022
Gospel: Luke 15: 1-32
The other day I was making my rounds at the VA hospital, and one of the nurses told me that there was a new addition to Hospice. I said “Okay” and I went in to the patient’s room. He didn’t look good at all and won’t make it through the weekend Although they gave him two years in the original diagnosis, his doctors helped him get six years beyond that. He got eight years when he was supposed to have two. That shows you how well medicine works. But now he was on his way to see the Savior. I was talking to his wife and his sister-in-law was also there. Very nice and sweet people. I told them that I needed to ask them some questions because I have to do a Chaplain’s Spiritual Assessment for every patient who comes in. Mostly, it’s creative writing on my part. One of the questions is “Do you have any end-of-life issues?” So how long have you had this chaplain gig? End-of-life issue means end of life. Yeah, I’ve got a real issue with that! Are you crazy? But they want something in the file, so I create a narrative of what’s happening with the patient to make the hospital happy. If they don’t see it, they get a little antsy. So, I asked his wife if he had any particular religion. She said no. Did he go to church when he was able?” No. He was a very interesting man, and I wish I had met him before he became so ill. I may have crossed paths with him in the first Gulf War. His job was explosive ordinance disposal and he disassembled mines and bombs. He wasn’t exactly the nervous type before that – maybe afterward – but not before. He was pretty good at his job because he survived it. And he was blessed because he got a disease – none of us know when we will contract one – and he lived well beyond the original diagnosis. You never know. I told him and his family that I would come back to visit on my afternoon rounds. So, I continued my rounds, visiting other patients. I ran into the nurse practitioner for Hospice, and she asked me if I had seen the new Hospice patient and given him Last Rites. I said, “No, he’s not Catholic. His wife said he is Christian.” She said, “Well, according to our records, he’s Catholic.” Okay. So, after lunch I went on my afternoon rounds, and the wife and sister-in-law were not in the room. I looked around to make sure the coast was clear and gave the man the Last Rites. And just as I was finishing, his wife and sister-in-law walked in. Whew! I snuck that one in! I accomplished the mission. . .by any means necessary. I told the nurse manager what I did, but it was never written down because we didn’t want to cause any more problems. I’m a real certified weasel, but I’m a weasel for Christ.
This is how much God loves us. I have people come up to me all the time, and rightly so, asking for prayers for family members, loved one, needs, worries, fears, and all sorts of troubles we are prone to. I’m happy to pray for them, but I try to tell them, if I remember, that no matter how much you love this person, God loves him or her much more. That’s why God created them in His image and likeness. That’s why He suffered and died for them. That’s why He is constantly running after them to beg them to embrace Him and His love. God never gives up. Read the “Hounds of Heaven,” a poem by Francis Thompson. God is always running after us, so much is His great love, that even at the moment of death if we say we are sorry for our sins just because we are afraid of dying and the eternal fires of hell and not because we are particularly sorry for them, God forgives us. That is sufficient and God will forgive us. Remember the 6th prayer from the Cross: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” One of the greatest experiences of God’s love is His mercy.
Saint John Vianney, known as the Curé d’Ars, is the patron saint for parish priests. God’s gift to him was that he could read souls. One day, he was walking along a road in France in an area where his parish was located. A woman approached him and said, “Curé, you know my husband died.” Father Vianney said, “Yes.” The woman said, “He fell off a bridge and drowned. He’s in hell, isn’t he?” Saint Vianney said, “I don’t know.” The woman yelled, “You can read souls! Why don’t you know? He beat me, he drank, he gambled. . .“ She had a whole laundry list of how bad her husband had been. “So, he’s in hell, isn’t he?” Saint Vianney replied, “I don’t know. There’s a long time from when he left the bridge and when he hit the water.”
Even in that short span of time, he could have said, “I’m sorry,” and that would have been sufficient. Perfect contrition is if you say “I’m sorry” because you love God. Imperfect contrition is if you said it because you don’t want to go to hell. Even so, that is sufficient to receive God’s forgiveness. So much does He love us. He sees all our trials, worries, and concerns about those who are near and dear to us. But remember, God loves them more than you do, and He will never, ever give up on them as long as they have a breath in them.
Father’s Afterthoughts. . .
My day is never dull. There is always something interesting going on here. Today, I had a wedding, and the bride came up in a carriage drawn by horses. I got to pet the horses. I love horses! I’m still six years old. Quoting Sir Winston Churchill, Doctor Eddins, a local physician, said, “There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.”
How will you apply this message to your life? ________________________________________
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