Scripture Reflections

And he allowed no one to follow him except Peter and James and John the brother of James. (Mark 5:37)
 
This verse from Sunday’s Gospel reading points to a reality that can be hard to acknowledge: We are not all given the same experience of God’s work in our lives.
 
From a very early age, most of us are concerned with fairness. Our general conception of fairness is that everyone should get the same opportunity. Offering the same opportunity is important at a societal level, but parents realize that each child needs different things. The reason we should offer the same opportunities to everyone at the societal level is because it takes intimate personal knowledge to rightly change the opportunities and still maintain fairness. You must know the child to know what opportunities he or she needs—in other words, tailoring what you give requires a personal knowledge that is impossible at the societal level, and so we establish fairness by trying to give the same opportunity to all.
 
God’s sense of fairness is much more like a parent giving very different things to each child than it is like a society giving the same opportunities to all. In fact, the Bible says explicitly that we are given different gifts and even different amounts of faith (Romans 12:3-8). Because he knows us, he gives to each of us differently. This isn’t just gifting, but instead includes experiences and faith itself!
 
This means that some of us will have an easier time believing than others. Some will have more experience of God’s power than others. Some will have a greater sense of the presence of the Spirit than others. God deals with each of us differently, as he sees fit. Some will receive gifts that others are denied.
 
This may be frustrating, especially when we look at what someone else received. Why did Peter, James, and John (but not the other disciples) get to see the little girl raised from the dead? Why don’t we have the same blessings as another in the church? But God’s differing gifts to each of us spring from his deep knowledge of us and his profound love for us. Rather than wish that we had received something else, we ought to realize that there is something unique and beautiful that he is seeking to do in each of us.
 
In Christ,
Steven+