Thy lovely saints do bring Thee love...

....Incense and joy and gold;
Fair star with star, fair dove with dove,
Have brought Thee sins and tears;
Yet I too bring a little love
Amid my flaws and fears.
A trembling love that faints and fails
Yet still is love of Thee,
A wondering love that hopes and hails
Thy boundless Love of me;
Love kindling faith and pure desire,
Love following on to bliss,
A spark, O Jesu, from Thy fire,
A drop from Thine abyss. - C.R.

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What does one do with the things in life which God gives you? As human beings, when someone gives us a gift it often seems to be the tendency to take it, own it, and do with it as we please. But when it comes to gifts from God, that is a different matter. He gives them to us not to possess but to nurture and make abundant... so that we may give it back to Him for His glory and honor. Just like in the parable of the talents where the man entrusts his servants with his property, when God blesses us (and these blessings come in many forms, but they are always things we do not deserve. They are the things which God gives to us to show His overflowing love for us. Even though He could have stopped giving us things we didn't deserve at the resurrection, we see Him still thinking of us, in His sending the Holy Spirit, and in His involvement in our lives in ways we could never have hoped or expected). He gives to us so that we may be like Him in His desire to make abundant what is good and beautiful, so that we may imitate Him in His fecundity by cultivating and caring for these things. Yet if we try to possess it, which is not ours in the first place to possess, and if we do not do what we have been commissioned by Him to do, we become like the servant who did not invest the talents given to him, and will be left to admit to our Master: "I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground" (Matthew 25:24-25). This fear to invest in the masters money is self-focused. It is a fear of losing that thing which He has given to us without realizing that it is not about us at all. Yet we do not want to lose it; we do not want to give it up. There is a risk involved, to be sure, but do we not have faith that God in His wisdom chose us to care for it and that He knows what He is doing? If we do not take the risk it will not even be given the chance to grow.
We have to take the risk, even if we doubt that we are capable of managing it well. After all, if God chose to give it to us then we do not need to fear at our own limitations and inabilities. Perhaps the responsibility is overwhelming, but it does not have to be. And if we can learn to trust and love God; if we can recognize that He is the Master who reaps where He has not sowed and gathered where He scattered no seed, then what He has set before us will be given the chance to flourish and abound, and become all that He intended it to be, and indeed, all that we hoped it would be.

It is then that we will have gained all that we did not want to lose, and it is then that our Master will turn to us and say "Well done, good and faithful servant" (Matthew 25:21).