Building Shoe Racks and His Kingdom
February 21, 2024 | By Matt Pang Cornell ‘25
image description: shoes stacked carefully on a shoe rack
God doesn’t want to save us without us. Here’s what I mean.
I remember when I was four years old; my mother and I built an Ikea shoe rack together. One might wonder why she’d choose to build a shoe rack with a concerningly uncoordinated toddler when she could have easily finished the project on her own. The answer is fairly simple: it’s because she wanted to. Out of caritas, or charitable love, she gifted me with the valuable experience of building something with her.
In the same vein, God is capable of doing whatever He wants whenever He wants. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, God is actus purus or pure act: He does all. Therefore, He doesn’t need us at all, but His heart desperately wants us; every second of every day, He persistently pursues us. Similar to building the shoe rack with my mother, our Father in heaven deeply desires to build His kingdom with His children, not for His benefit but for ours.
We see this beautiful relationship between God and His children in the story of Jonah. According to scripture, “The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, ‘Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.’... And the people of Nineveh believed God.” [1] In sum, God used His child Jonah to adopt the Ninevites and bring them home.
Yet, despite this partnership, we must remember our utter dependence on God. Just as my mother gently twisted my toddler hand in order to fasten the screws, we see—in Psalm 51—David’s childlike reliance on God to carry Him through life. David writes,
“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me…Cast me not away from your presence and take not your holy Spirit from me.” [2]
If a powerful king like David trembles at the thought of God abandoning him, we must also cling unto our Father in Heaven for the rest of our days. Thus, as David prayed that God would take control of his life, and my toddler self was overcome by my mother’s guidance through the shoe rack building process, we all must surrender to the will of our charitable Father.
Furthermore, roughly 1000 years after the life of King David, God fully immersed Himself in the human experience through the incarnation of Christ, bridging the gap between divinity and humanity. Through Jesus Christ, fully man and fully God, He allowed the screws to be fastened into Himself for our salvation. Today, we live because the suffering servant Jesus died.
To conclude, during this Lent season may we completely submit ourselves to God’s will. May we be vessels of God’s grace, instruments through which students on campus may find their way back home to the Father.
References:
[1], [2], https://www.lectionarypage.net/WeekdaysOfLent/WednesdayFirstWeek.html