Two men went fishing one day. One man was an experienced fisherman; the other wasn’t. Every time the experienced fisherman caught a big fish, he put it in his ice chest to keep it fresh. Whenever the inexperienced fisherman caught a big fish, he threw it back. The experienced fisherman watched this go on all day and finally got tired of seeing this man waste good fish. “Why do you keep throwing back all the big fish you catch?” he asked. The inexperienced fisherman replied, “I only have a small frying pan.”
Sometimes, like that fisherman, we throw back the big plans, big dreams, big ideas, and big opportunities that God sends us, because our faith is too small. And we may have laughed at that fisherman who didn’t figure out that all he needed was a bigger frying pan; yet how ready are we to increase the size of our faith? In our faith life, it’s important for us to remember the bigger picture of what God wants to do for us. We just celebrated August 15th, God assuming Mary into heaven, body and soul, at the end of her earthly mission. So, God will lift the whole Church into communion with Himself in Heaven at the end of history.
Mary’s Assumption, then, is God’s promise to us. Every Christian who follows Mary’s path of humility and fidelity to God’s can look forward to following her into the joys of heaven. That’s one of the reasons the Church celebrates the Assumption: the Church wants our faith to be big and strong, like Mary’s. It wants us to remember that God is All-Powerful and Loving. He does wonderful things in, through, and for those people who really trust Him, as Mary did. So, God has big hopes for us — Assumption-sized hopes. Seeing how His hopes for the Blessed Virgin Mary were so wonderfully fulfilled should help increase our faith. And as the angel Gabriel said to Mary long before her Assumption, “nothing is impossible for God.”
Let us always then allow our faith to grow, so that God’s works in us may be made to completion, where we can then share eternal Joy — Body and Soul — in Heaven with Him!!