Perhaps you've heard of the little girl showing her friends around her house?
When she got to the bathroom, she pointed to the scale and said, "I don't know what that is, but whenever mum and dad stand on it, and it makes them mad."
If you are like me, you've shifted about on the scale to get it to tell you something that made you more comfortable. It's a bit comical how we seek affirmation from a bathroom scale - a mere object existing outside ourselves. When an inanimate thing fails to validate what we want to be told, we can, like the girl's parents, get frustrated, often harbouring negative feelings toward ourselves.
Life doesn't always weigh up for us the way we would hope. When we are frustrated or afraid that things are not going the way we think they ought; when we are unable to pacify our internal anxieties and worries we might, as with a bathroom scale, nudge people around us, shifting one person this way and another that way until we ourselves can feel more comfortable in ourselves.
If any of this sounds familiar, consider the baptism of Jesus in which God is reported in all four Gospels as declaring, "This is my Son in whom I am well pleased." Who could hope for better affirmation than that! As Jesus did, so we are invited to seek our comfort in our relationship with God. At baptism (and again at confirmation), we ask that God’s Holy Spirit fill every aspect of our being and guide our thoughts, words, and actions throughout our lives. While the event of baptism is but a moment in time, the promise of baptism is timeless.
Without faith, however, without belief in the providence of the indwelling God, the only alternative is to find validation in the objects, lives, and situations outside us.
