Finding gold among the sand

Do you sometimes feel you're bogged down in the sand and unable to move? Has your work become mundane and your spirits won't seem to lift? Is this going to go on forever?

Not if you look to see what's beneath the sand, hidden under the ordinariness of your life.

Nothing or no one is great all the time. I've felt a time or two in my life that everything was going so well, I would never be cheerless again. My faith was strong, and I knew to read an inspirational book, pray or talk with someone would lift me up.

"I'd never despair regardless of what happened," I told myself.

But life moved along in a stimulating manner for a while, then the new became old and the exciting became tedious. It seemed like nothing was happening. Life was at a standstill, and I could see nothing novel arriving to give me energy. I thought I couldn't endure the monotony.

Dorothy Byrant's comments opened my eyes when she said, "Like a gold-panning prospector, you must resign yourself to digging up a lot of sand from which you will later wash out a few minute particles of gold ore."

If we expect things to be perfect, interesting and restful all the time, we are in for disappointment.

We are keeping ourselves from the perseverance that's necessary to follow God's will and we are getting in our own way.

During the California gold rush, some found gold and others were disillusioned. But the ones finding gold were notably thrilled and joyful -- for a while, at least. The gold created goodwill and happiness in the lives of some -- others, it destroyed. It was all in how they handled the good that came to them.

Just as we often raise children or attend church each Sunday but see little else besides, we begin to think there's little else for us. We've reached it all. We have our house, family, friends and enough money to live on. So we plod along seeing each day like the one before it. We resign ourselves to remaining the same. Then a glimmer of hope and excitement jumps up at us. We've found something useful and wonderful in all that ordinariness. It's no longer humdrum.

That's the way life is. We have to constantly sift through the sand picking out the good and casting away the bad.

Try to search out and follow God's plan. Sand is slippery and moves quickly, covering what's hidden. We must watch for what God is revealing to us, clutch it and look to see if it's worth keeping.

What God is showing to us may fail to look like gold. It may be disguised in ugliness and filth, as were Mother Theresa's poorest of the poor to whom she ministered.

We can't expect everything in life to glitter and fill us with beauty and thrills. If we merely seek what brings pleasure, we miss out on the trip. The journey we take each time we work on projects results in the gold of satisfaction we feel when we finish.

Gideon finally obeyed God's call to save Israel only because he believed God's assurance:

"I shall be with you." (Judges 6:16)

The Lord told Gideon to send most of his soldiers home and defeat the Midianites with only three hundred men in Judges 7:7.

Maybe we use too many soldiers of our own rather than letting God do his job. We don't want to falsify the texture of lives. The homespun quality of an amount of monotony can bring comfort and peace. Constant excitement and goal setting can stress our spirits.

Perhaps we need to pray for God's light so we can find what gold we're supposed to discover hidden among the sand of our lives -- it's there!

Ellen Shuck is director of religious education at St. Mary Cathedral.