By Fr. Victor Feltes
Great love is powerfully expressed through great trials. When Mabel was only eleven years old, she experienced a shocking personal loss. Her ten-year-old sister Betty passed away from an appendicitis. And for the rest of Mabel’s life it seems she wanted to help make sure others were safe and well. Mabel would live to be the last-surviving member of the family of her birth. She served as a caregiver to her parents and her adult siblings as they passed on before her.
She was married in this church to her husband George in 1958. They gave life to four sons together, including two, John and Tim, who passed away in infancy. After fourteen years of marriage, Mabel became a widow at age forty-three. She raised her two boys, Michael and George, on her own; doing her best to fill the role of two parents, for instance, taking them out to go fishing. Then, after her retirement, Mabel began raising children anew at age seventy-two. She cared for her grandkids, Katie and Sarah, concerned for both their bodies and souls, for instance often saying, “Remember to pray and brush your teeth!” How did Mabel say she liked raising children? “I had a ball.”
Kindly but firm, Mabel was not swayed by the increasingly straying views of popular culture. She has been a well-known St. Paul’s parishioner for many years volunteering at our school and singing in our church choir. She would take the girls with her up to the balcony for funerals. The other choir members and widowed school teachers were often recipients of Mabel’s care.
I remember Mabel telling me in her room at Dove nursing home, that she had been a teacher for a total of thirty-three years (seven years elsewhere and then twenty-six years here in Bloomer). She loved teaching her students and said she would still like to teach—if she were not ninety-three years old. I saw her Tuesday afternoons when I brought her our Lord Jesus in the Holy Eucharist and she always received him with devotion.
Because of circumstances of her upbringing, Mabel had a hard time accepting God’s amazing love for us. She once remarked, “When I [was growing] up, I never knew that God loved me.” At times, she wondered, “How could Christ die just for me?” Yet Jesus Christ has powerfully revealed his great love for us, especially through his trials.
Why else would God become man in Jesus Christ if not from great concern that we would be safe and well? Jesus comes to us as a teacher in a visible life on earth thought to have numbered thirty-three years. Kindly but firm, he possesses and imparts truth in an errant world. He formed young disciples in his charge; sometimes he even took them fishing. He comes as our Good Shepherd, laying down his life for his sheep, desiring none of us to be lost.
Jesus worshiped at his Father’s house and offered himself in sacrifice on the Cross. Now he calls us to worship in his Church and receive the great gift of himself offered in the Holy Eucharist. Jesus, now risen, is the first-surviving member of his family. Raised from the dead, he lives forever to help us through this life into the next. He is the faithful, loving caregiver of his spouse and his brothers and sisters; that is, of his Church as a whole and each of us individually.
So you see, Jesus Christ forms faithful Christians to be more and more like himself, and shepherds them to be with him in paradise. “What will separate us from the love of Christ? Will anguish or distress, or persecution or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword?” Despite all these things, we can conquer overwhelmingly through him who loves us. Mabel, in her final recent trial, found comfort in this truth, as she often sang that sweet children’s song: “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know.” Let us be faithful to Christ, so that together with Mabel we may “behold our God, to whom we looked to save us!”
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January 23, 2023 at 7:05 pm |
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