It Mattered (12/15/2025)

Yesterday afternoon, I checked my email and saw a name I recognized but hadn’t seen for more than a quarter of a century. I thought it must be a different person than the one I remembered, and my curiosity led me to tap the message to see.

“I’m not sure whether you’ll remember me. It’s been a very long time. But I was thinking of you.”  Imagine my amazement. It was the young man I remembered. I was even more amazed that he remembered me. He wrote to thank me for my role in his faith formation at Sacred Hearts Parish in Sun Prairie. I reread one line in particular multiple times: “Wednesday afternoons were such a special time for me.”

It did matter, I kept telling myself. It did matter. Then he shared his memory of my telling the students that I prayed for them daily by name. That stuck with him. It did matter.

I wrote this fine young man a thank you message immediately. I hope my words were able to convey just how much his message meant to me. I know it has been years, but that is part of its magnitude. After all this time, it still mattered. It mattered enough for him to write to me.

So much of what we do, we do in faith, we do in hope, we do with love, yet we are not sure of how much it truly matters. But then, every once in a while, we are assured that our faith, our hope, and our love shared with others did matter. Those are like spiritual cactus flowers or rainbows.

The year after my last bout with cancer, I dedicated it to giving thanks. I wrote so many from my past to thank them for sharing the journey with me and for their specific contributions. Gratitude is a remarkable virtue; with it, our whole outlook changes. When we make gratitude our modus operandi, the lens through which we judge, we begin to notice the invisible but transformative graces that surround us and that lift us and the one from whom they flow. And we appreciate those who put themselves and their lives and gifts at the LORD’s disposal.

As we journey through the third week of Advent dedicated to joy, may we remember the joys of our lives and give thanks for them no matter how distant they are. May our gifts this week be those moments of letting others who have accompanied us along the way that their presence, their faith, their hope, their love all mattered.

Until tomorrow, let us all love well.