VI. Ever to See You and Serve You in Our Neighbor

From the Series: Beneath the Standard of Mary – The Heart and Voice of an Auxiliary Member

Before you were born, He knew you.

This is scriptural, straight out of Jeremiah. Before you drew your first breath, before your mother knew your name, before anyone in this world had any idea you were coming, God knew you, and saw you, He formed you deliberately and personally and with full knowledge of everything you would ever be.

And He did that for every single person who has ever lived.

Every one of us, without exception.

That is the foundation of this phrase, ever to see You and serve You in our neighbor. Because if God knew every soul before it was born, if every human being carries within them the image and likeness of God, then looking at another person and seeing only what is on the surface is missing the most important thing about them. Beneath whatever they have become, beneath the anger, the selfishness, the cruelty, the indifference, the brokenness, there is a soul that God made and God loves and God has never stopped pursuing.

That changes everything about how we are supposed to treat people.

Now I will be honest with you because this reflection deserves honesty. Seeing Jesus in your neighbor is not always easy. In fact, sometimes it is one of the hardest things faith asks of us. It is relatively straightforward to see God in someone who is kind and generous and easy to be around. But what about the people who are poison? What about the ones in power who use it to crush others? What about the ones who have looked you in the eye and told you plainly that they have no interest in God, no time for his laws, no use for anything beyond what this world can give them?

We have to pray for all of them.

I know that is not what the flesh wants to hear. And I will tell you something even more honest, I have prayed prayers that surprised even me. I have asked God to shake certain people up. To bring them to their knees if that is what it takes. To allow something into their lives that strips away the comfortable distance they have put between themselves and eternity. And I know how that sounds. I know it can sound cruel.

But it is not cruelty. It is the deepest kind of love.

Because sometimes the most merciful thing God can do for a soul that has spent decades running from Him is to allow that soul to run out of road. The doctor’s appointment that changes everything. The loss that cannot be explained away or bought off or ignored. The moment when the world a person has built their entire identity around suddenly reveals itself as fragile and temporary and utterly insufficient for what they are facing right now.

It is in those moments that people who have never prayed a day in their adult lives find themselves on their knees. And whether that prayer is pure faith or desperate bargaining, only God knows. But He is there for it either way. He was waiting for it, and He never stopped waiting.

That is why we pray for the difficult ones. Not because we are better than them, we are not. Not because we have it figured out and they do not. But because we know something they have not yet discovered that there is no version of this life that ends well without God in it. And every person we write off as too far gone, too hardened, too committed to the world, every one of them is a soul that Jesus died for. The same death He died for us, the same Cross he was Crucified on, He paid the same price for all of them.

Who are we to decide it was wasted on them?

Seeing Jesus in our neighbor means developing a kind of spiritual vision that looks past what is visible to what is possible. It means looking at a person not only as they are right now but as who they could become if grace got hold of them. It means understanding that people who are cruel need healing. People who are mean and selfish and indifferent are not simply bad people, they are wounded people who have never encountered the love of God in a way that actually reached them. And maybe, just maybe, the way it reaches them is through you. Through your patience with them when patience makes no sense. Through your kindness when they have done nothing to deserve it. Through your quiet consistent prayer for them even when they would laugh at the idea that anyone was praying for them at all.

That is what it means to serve Jesus in your neighbor. I’m not saying just the easy neighbors, or just the ones who appreciate it. All of them.

I often times walk the grounds of the Fatima Shrine carrying all of these things in my heart. On one particular day, the sun was out, the air was quiet, and it struck me as it often does in this place, Our Lady stood at the foot of the Cross and looked at the very people who put her Son there and she did not stop loving them. She did not stop praying for them, and she has never stopped.

If she can do that, if she can intercede without ceasing for every soul including the ones that broke her heart, then the least we can do is try.

See Jesus Christ in everyone you meet today; even the difficult ones, or should I say, especially the difficult ones.

Serve Him in that way.

I hope you are enjoying this series, there is so much more to come.