When Your World Blows into Pieces

(or How Fr. Joemarie's Pitcher of Orange Juice Showed Me the Meaning of God's Enduring Love)

After I graduated from college, I taught for a year in Sta. Maria Catholic School, a Jesuit high school in Iloilo (Central Philippines). I was full of hope, full of passion and my idealism ran high. I was ready to conquer the world, one student at a time. Then came personal and familial problems along with them a friendship that had gone sour. I was away from family and friends on an island where I only had a few acquaintances.

The priest I was living in the convent with arrived very late at night and I went to school very early in the morning when he was still fast asleep. We rarely had the time to talk except on Sunday evenings after his priestly duties. But my problems could not wait for a few more days. I was beginning to explode inside. So I took a few hours off from school. I waited for him to go down from his room so we could have breakfast together. I cooked for him some bacon and eggs, french toasts I learned to prepare from watching Kramer vs. Kramer, and a pitcher of orange juice.

I wanted to seek his opinion on things that bothered me for weeks. As he settled himself down our little dinner table, I started stirring the sugar inside the glass pitcher. He was very pleased with what I prepared: it showed in his eyes and the wide smile on his lips. I picked the pitcher up from the kitchen sink when all of a sudden it fell on the floor scattering juice and shards of glass. I was very afraid that Fr. Joemarie would accost me for my carelessness. What he did surprised me and endeared him more to me: He just smiled, did not say anything, and then he knelt down and began picking up the pieces of glass that had scattered on the floor. Then he told me to go up and change my clothes.

In a very simple gesture I understood what it meant for God to love me with an everlasting and enduring love. When things go wrong and nothing seems right in my life. When I have committed the most serious blunder. When I have time and time again offended him. When my world seems to explode because I want to carry it inside my heart like I would a liter of orange juice in a pitcher, and when my dreams shatter before my eyes: He is there. He does not say anything. He just smiles at me. Then He kneels down and slowly but surely He begins picking up the pieces of my littered self. And then He says: "Go up son and change your clothes."

God the Father loves me so that He does the picking of my shattered self. And He does not want me to stay wet and shivering in cold. He forgives all my sins and gives me new clothes; new body, new spirit to wear so I can greet the day with more courage, more patience and more love because I have been loved, I am loved first and foremost.

When we carry our burdens by ourselves and when our world seems to blow from within, God does the unthinkable. And pretty soon, we just realize: we are whole and new again.