How Malleable Are You in God's Hands?

1 Jn 2:29-3:6 / Jn 1:29-34

There's something in us that can't stop wondering what the next part of life will be like. How old will we be? Will we still like to bridge or basketball or whatever? What will our bodies be like? We have all sorts of questions and even more fantastic speculations about the answers. And none of it matters one whit.

In today's gospel, St. John points us in a more useful direction. "What we shall be later has not yet come to light. But when it comes to light, we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is." There's some gold hidden in that line, which we could easily miss. John is saying that the very experience of seeing God face-to-face will transform us into God's likeness. The change will not come by force from the outside, but freely from the inside, from the heart which at the sight of God will instinctively let go of anything less than God and give itself into God's hands to be reshaped.

That brings us squarely back to the present, for the ultimate transformation that John is talking about is simply the final stage of what our life and especially our prayer should have been about all along, namely, being reconfigured into God's image and likeness. The process of making ourselves malleable in the hands of our Father is the essential work of every day and of a lifetime. So don't let another day pass.