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.
Just as we all have our personal moments of annunciation, so 
do we all have glimpses of a second coming.
For Thomas, who had walked and talked and prayed and eaten with Jesus, the second coming occurred a few days after the others saw the risen Lord. We remember that he doubted their accounts. We tend to buzz past his reaction when he saw Jesus: “My Lord and my God!”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says baptism “symbolizes the catechumen’s burial into Christ’s death, from which he rises up by resurrection with him, as a ‘new creature.’” That’s a mighty powerful formal first coming of the Lord into our lives.
And what of second comings? They occur in joy, when we marry, give birth, and do His work in so many other ways. But they occur in despair, when the relationship ends, when we get that diagnosis, when we’re out of money and hope, and in pain, when the physical or mental or emotional burden is overpowering.
In short, He comes to us all the time, but so often, at those moments in life when we have spent all we have and have nowhere else to go. It is in those moments or their aftermaths that we realize, as Paul writes in Ephesians 2:21, “the whole structure is held together.” In Him and in Him alone, the center holds.
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