This Pope Gives me Hope

Very late last night I couldn’t sleep.  I was feeling tired, discourage and depressed.  Sometimes the pain takes over you and you just have to cry.  But instead, at 2AM I got up out of bed and I Goggled “the Pope and the little boy who wouldn’t leave his side” and “the Pope and the man with a deformity”.  I haven’t been one to feel great love for our Popes in recent years, but this guy, Francis, has caught my eye.  I finally felt the presence of Christ in a Pontiff.  Somehow this man with a deformity, and this little boy who clung on to Pope Francis seemed so much like me, so much like all of us, needing to experience the embrace of a loving God.   I thought about the movie, “As Good as it Gets” and I felt like Jack Nicholson’s character when he made the statement, “You make me want to be a better man.”

For some reason this Pope has that effect on me.  He makes me want to be a better person.  He seems to be so much about the business of loving God and loving each other.  He doesn’t have to worry or preach about sin when his focus is so completely on love.   Some of my best teachers have been the people who lived their lives with love and kindness.  They haven’t told me so much how I should live; they simply modeled marvelous, loving, generous behavior.  I observed them and was carried along in their wave.   In the wee hours of the night, I watched the U-tube videos of our Pope, Francis, several times over and as I sat there I could feel the love of God in his embrace.    I logged off my computer, went back to bed with a ray of hope in my heart and promptly fell asleep.