In the Image of God

For Christmas Eve this year, we brought a group of our students to a home for the mentally disabled to throw a Christmas party for their kids. This is mainly due to the efforts of one of my colleagues, for whom this has been a family event for many years -- and made the extra effort last year to extend it into a school event for our students.

Spending several hours with the kids at the Home is quite an experience. It is challenging -- children with mental disabilities also often have physical disabilities and emotional/behavioral handicaps mixed in with it. Some of these children are so severely underdeveloped that they have trouble holding their own heads up, or they do self-destructive things like putting their hands so far back into their throats that they choke themselves, or even go about running into things and hurting themselves.

A friend and I went to midnight mass at St. John's the same night. The service started with the traditional hymn, "Once in Royal David's City". Listening to the choir sing the words "with the poor, the scorned, the lowly", and "he was little, weak and helpless", images of the children kept on popping up in my head, and I was so overwhelmed that I broke down in tears. Indeed, each of them were made in His own image, and He obviously loves them as much as He loves each of us. And we can be thankful for the hope that He promises for all of us:

we shall see him; but in heaven,
set at God's right hand on high;
when like stars his children crowned,
all in white shall wait around.

Those children will be at His feet, healed of the afflictions that handicap them here on earth.