We can be too quick to give up sometimes. We may choose to abandon a project or a person because we deem the progress being made is not sufficient to merit further effort on our part or the risk of damage, collateral or otherwise, is too high. It is a very rational and perhaps efficient thinking. Fortunately it is not the way our God seems to think.

God does not demand that we have achieved perfection in order to love us. God does not require that we have completed the construction of a highway that is straight, level and smooth before our God will love us. What God asks of us is that we keep working on it, that we keep working on ourselves. As St. Augustine came to understand, God asks that we pay less attention to our sinful nature and focus more on the comfort God offers to us and the forgiveness of our sins that God has worked out for us. Even when we wander away and get hopelessly lost, God searches for us, keeps seeking us.

A mother was told that her partially deaf son was "unteachable." Her response was: "Then, I'll teach him myself." She must have done fairly well since that boy grew into the inventor Thomas A. Edison. With God's grace may we see potential where others only see disability, may we seek redemption rather than judgment and may we allow God to find us whenever we become lost.