Junjun FAITHBOOK

Moment of Grace

Undoubtedly, Saints are just human beings yet are now experiencing the fullness of God’s grace in heaven. Thus on those times that we ask for their help, they always can’t help but share the graces they’ve enjoyed to us by helping us out.

I can attest that St Anthony of Padua is one who has helped me in more ways than one in many difficult or awkward situations I was in. He is one of my favourite saints. When things  seem to be out of my hand and even at times hard to do, I would just call him and say: St Anthony, please help me here. Please intercede for me to our Lord that this thing will be fixed or  help me get away from this awkward situation. Almost immediately, within few seconds or sometimes a minute, a certain broken thing is fixed. The same thing also happens if I am confronted with a difficult situation, I would just silently call St Anthony’s help and almost always, things seem to change quite quickly may  it be in my perception or understanding, or even in a most trivial matters like fixing  broken things.

With St Anthony’s assistance and intercession every time I call on him (and it happened many times now), I come to three realizations. First is that God’s grace is so abundant that no one can claim it as his/her own only. In fact with God’s grace, one can’t do anything but share it with others. Second is that it’s already laid out before us. However, he is inviting us to make ourselves available for his graces. We can do this by being aware of our human situation that as one of the ways by which God channels through his graces to us. And third is that grace is not something we can measure or contain because it is God’s personal way of relating to us. He might be using channels such as his Creation, or the works of nature, or to the Saints like St Anthony, or through ordinary people or even just in our ordinary circumstances, yet the bottomline of it all  is that it is God’s initiative to come to us in a more real, personal and intimate manner.