Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

If you’re reading this it means I’m still alive! I wrote another version because I felt like I was dying this afternoon and it was to be sent should I have expired.

That may be a bit of a stretch.

But it is to say that an illness visited Brayden and then me. The last night of our trip (Thursday) this past week he started feeling unwell. He hadn’t been able to keep a meal down until this evening. Then last night I woke with….unfortunate….symptoms myself.

So our grand adventure was cut short by sickness and by the simple fact that kids may not always give us what we want but they will always give us their germs.

The week started with lots of swimming, water slides, rock climbing, and the like. On our last day we went to the state fair. Rode rides. Played games. Ate. Refinanced our home to pay for the state fair. All pretty normal.

But all a stretch. Some of the rides were daunting. Some of the food was new. The games were fun but felt a bit rigged so the boys got frustrated.

Back at the hotel, Nikolas managed to bang his nose in a wave pool. Brayden is covered from head to toe in bumps and bruises from the same pool. They loved it.

We could have avoided all of this and just stayed home. We could have skipped the sickness, gotten around the bumps and bruises, and more.

It’s a microcosm of life and faith, love and relationship, dreams and aspiration.

All of it requires that we might get sick. We might care for someone who is bad for our immune system or our heart.

We might find at the end of the line that we’re not sure it was worth it.

Maybe we shouldn’t have cared.

Maybe we should have narrowed the horizon to what is right in front of us. We might lose money or lose face or lose a sense of who we are in the midst of loving and caring in this world.

We will take the bumps and bruises if we go out.

But that’s the journey. Christ shows us a model for engaging life that is absolutely chock full of risks. Even to the end.

But more than that he shows us that the resurrection power of love heals all wounds, binds all hurts, and tends all hope. Christ invites us headlong into experiencing the world in all of its strangeness, joy, and wonder. He invites us to experience the world with all of its heartaches and dark nights of the soul.

But he invites us. Make no mistake. He invites us to be fully alive and ready not to stand off at a safe distance but to get as close as a cross and a crèche to our fellow humanity.

It’s not safe. It never has been. Thanks be to God.

—Fr Robert