Here are some of the things which go towards making each human person what he is: heredity, environment, infant and child experience, opportunity, education or lack of education, friends or lack of friends, and the countless unpredictable things that we misname accidents or chance.

We are told that we have been chosen by God out of innumerable potential people whom he did not create. But very seldom do we think about the mystery of all the years and all the people and all the gathered memories, both of individuals and races, which have made us individually what we are.

Our life has been given to us from generation to generation, existing in each age in the keeping of other human beings, tended in the Creator’s hands, a little flame carried through darkness and storm, burning palely in brilliant sunlight, shining out like a star in darkness—life in the brave keeping of love given from age to age in a kiss.

To some these ages of experience and memory have handed down gifts of health and sound nerves and a buoyant attitude to life; to others gifts of mind, talents, sensitivity. Some are endowed with a natural Christianity; others inherit dark and terrible impulses and crumbling weaknesses, fears, and neuroses.

It is a great mistake to suppose that those who have inherited the material for their life from suffering generations, and who have poor health and a timid approach or some vice or weakness, have not been designed and planned by God as much as others who seem luckier in the world’s eyes.

Christ has said: "I am the Way," and he has been there in every generation, blowing with the Divine Breath of the Spirit on that little flame of life.

He is the Way, but he is not limited as we are. He can manifest himself in countless ways we do not dream of. He can will to live in lives of suffering and darkness we cannot conceive of. He can choose what seems to us the most unlikely material in the world to use for a positive miracle of his love.

The tendency of our generation is to worship physical and material happiness, to set up types for the multitudes to emulate—hearty, healthy, insensitive types they are, as a rule, too; always young, usually aggressive.

These types are symbolic of the materialism of our age. They suggest a carefully camouflaged inferiority among the older people; for it is old people, frightened old people, who have set up this rather aggressive type. It is they who, in shelving their own responsibilities, their great obligation to be born again, are hoodwinking youth.

Christ is not restricted to any type: the glory of God is not more manifest in a strapping young man or woman marching behind the banner of Christianity than in one of the slaughtered innocents of Jerusalem or in the repentant thief dying on the cross.

The most striking example of the material God can and does use to manifest his glory is Lazarus.

Lazarus was not even alive; he was dead, and according to his chief mourners, stinking. But Christ used him as the material for showing forth the glory of God in a way surpassed only by his own Resurrection. The moment of his own Resurrection was secret, a secret between his heavenly Father and himself, but the raising of Lazarus dazzled the world.

Each one of us—as we are at the moment when we first ask ourselves: "For what purpose do I exist?"—is the material which Christ himself, through all the generations that have gone to our making, has fashioned for his purpose.

That which seems to us to be a crumbling point, a lack, a thorn in the flesh, is destined for God’s glory as surely as the rotting bones of Lazarus, as surely as the radiance of Mary of Nazareth.

Our own experience, the experience of our ancestors and of all our race, has made us the material that we are. This material gives us the form of our life, the shape of our destiny….

Each one can, when he has cleared out the rubble even for a day, look honestly at the material from which he is made, and ask the Holy Spirit to let him show him the way Christ wills to show himself in his life….

How much can we do ourselves at this stage? … Not very much, for now as always, most of it is done by God. There is, however, one big thing we can do with God’s help. That is, we can trust God’s plan. We can put aside any quibbling or bitterness about ourselves and what we are.

We can accept and seize upon the fact that what we are at this moment, young or old, strong or weak, mild or passionate, beautiful or ugly, clever or stupid, is planned to be like that. Whatever we are gives form to the emptiness in us which can only be filled by God and which God is even now waiting to fill.

—Excerpted from The Reed of God by Caryll Houselander, Christian Classics Inc., pp. 5-9, (1987). This wonderful spiritual classic originally published in 1944 is back in print and available from Ave Maria Press.