Anyone else feel like those opening lines from today's readings were simultaneously validating and completely, totally depressing??

"Is not man's life on earth a drudgery?"

I hear ya, Job.

There are days when drudgery is a very good description of it all.  Especially in February.

The rest of it only goes downhill from there.  Thank God, for the rest of the readings.

 I always love to figure out how the chosen readings fit together.  Because they do!  They always do.  Written hundreds of years apart, they still make sense together.  It is such a reminder to me of the consistency of God and His Word to us and the beautiful wisdom of the Church as she chooses the readings for each liturgy.

So we start with the drudgery, the pain, the mental anguish and in the psalm move to healing.  

The Lord heals the brokenhearted.

Sometimes our hearts are broken by the big stuff - the divorce, the death, the betrayal - but sometimes it is just from the day to day drudginess of it all.  Our heart is chipped away at through doubts and frustrations and fears and depression and simply just how hard this all seems sometimes until we just feel like it's crumbling.  Again.

And the psalmist reminds us that the Lord is here to continually heal those hearts and bind up those wounds that the broken world has inflicted.  He is the divine doctor of our souls.  Sometimes we need to go to Him for the massive surgery after the trauma and sometimes it's just for the minor wounds that have built up and up over time from day to day life.

We come to wonderful Paul who is so excited to preach the Gospel.  He can't NOT do it, he says.  And he does it through his weakness.  Ugh, that's hard.  To let people see our weakness and allow that to speak the Good News?  Yikes.  For me, that's scary stuff.

And then, then we get to the Lord healing Peter's mother-in-law and it seems it's not of anything grandiose or dramatic but of a simple sickness.  He is healer and it's not just for the big stuff.  He wants to heal us, every single one of us, of our everyday wounds and drudgeries, changing them into stories that will make us incapable of NOT sharing the Good News.  Like Peter's mother-in-law and St. Paul himself, we are then able to serve the world through our healing and the testimony of our weakness.

Lord, heal us.  We ask that You heal us of all the things, big and little.  No concern is too small for Your love and by the touch of Your hand, You can transform our drudgery into glory.  Grant us acceptance of Your will and touch our hearts and bodies with your healing power and let us trust that You, our Beloved, know how best to do that.