Changing your water to wine

A wise priest recently asked me to reflect on the Wedding at Cana, the site of Jesus’ first miracle.

At Cana, when, to their great shame, the hosts of the wedding run out of wine, Mary informs Jesus of the situation and then tells the servants, “Do whatever He tells you.” Jesus guides every step from then onward until He miraculously turns the water into the very best wine.

As the priest said, responding to this command to do as Jesus directs us is clearly embodied in our daily duties: Your alarm clock goes off — get up. You have an assignment to do — get it done.

So I thought about it. I thought about giving him the water of my small efforts and letting him transform it into something great, and I thought that was a nice idea. And it is.

And then I had the rather less appealing thought about what happens to water when it sits. Water goes still, then stale, and eventually becomes contaminated. It then has the capacity to do nothing but taint and infect. When we become satisfied and stop listening, the same thing happens to us. We regress.

This process of changing water into wine or slime is much like our relationship with God. If we are faithful, constantly listening to His voice as He tells us what to do next, He transforms what we have into the best there is. On the contrary, if we sag into complacency, we can only collapse.

All of us do this, in our action or inaction. We let little things go — in our exchanges with those who we consider less desirable, in our relationships with our families, in our daily responsibilities and in our often cowardly inability to reject secular culture’s standards. Perhaps afraid of the challenge of holiness, we allow ourselves to stagnate.

Mediocrity is a plague that has beset my generation, and those who have chosen a life with Christ are not untouched by this sickness. Mediocrity has seeped into everything — our academics, goals, relationships, prayer, morality. Academics are about getting a grade. Prayer is about filling a quota. Relationships are reduced to a gross means of self-affirmation. We are lethargic, robotic and numb, too often unmotivated to choose the freedom to live and move and have our being in God as He would have it.

Mediocrity is like the minimum payment option that lets us think we’re maintaining our finances — but there is no such thing as “maintenance” as those fees pile up. Our relationship with God, reflected in the choices we make, is no different. It is either improving or deteriorating.

The most important truth is that with God, we are destined for incredible, incomparable greatness. We are called to be perfect as the Heavenly Father is perfect, and this is a profound honour that should both humble us and drive us to fight for excellence in love of God and neighbour.

Water can’t just sit, and neither can we.

(Wolfe, 21, is a Christianity & Culture student at Redeemer Pacific College in Langley, B.C.)