Note: On Tuesdays and some Sundays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.
It was a joke, I guess. Or maybe a misguided attempt to be helpful. Or maybe I was overly sensitive. Most likely, it was a
combination of all three.
An acquaintance who is quite sure her vocation as a wife and mother is the most difficult and most favored of all the vocations the Lord instills in us sent to a group of us an email titled for single women that was a bastardization of Luke 9:23: “If any man would come after me, let him.” Because, apparently, every single woman desires that a man, any man, will crook his finger and because any woman who finds herself single at any stage of her life regardless of experience or history is incomplete in the Lord’s eyes.
With prayer, I resisted the temptation to respond to the group, or to her privately. Attempts to engage in person on similar comments have not borne visual fruit. Maybe her lens on this is cloudy, but maybe mine is when it comes to her challenges. Maybe, like the apostles on the way to Capernaum in today’s Gospel reading from Mark 9, this is a discussion about greatness that simply doesn’t need to be had… or acknowledged. After all, the Lord loves her as much as He loves me. And so, as a friend would put it, I picked up my cross of judgment and self-defensiveness, swallowed it, and followed.
