I bet many of you have seen the Toy Story movies. I grew up with them. In fact, I remember sitting in the theater with my mom right around the time I went to college watching Toy Story 3. There’s a scene in the movie where the mom of the main character, Andy, gets emotional trying to deal with her son moving out to go to college. This was intentional- the movie makers knew that the kids and their parents who watched the first movie would have grown up alongside Andy and would be around that age. Playing with our feelings!

Anyway, the premise of the series involves seeing the world through the eyes of Andy’s toys. For them, there is no greater joy than Andy playing with them. They’re his toys, and many of them have his name written under their boot. They were made to be played with! Yet life isn’t always fair to them. Sometimes they get left in the toy box, they almost get accidentally sold in a garage sale, and some of them even get kidnapped by the evil neighbor kid, Sid, who loves to mess with them in malicious experiments. But in the end, they return to Andy and experience the joy of making him happy again.

Everything that has been created has been created for a purpose. A knife has been made to cut, a bird has been made to sing, a child’s toys have been made to be played with. And the human person? We have been created by God for eternal union with him in a life of perfect blessedness. We don’t always experience this in this world. In fact, we go through a lot of junk that feels very different than this. And we might say, “I wasn’t made for this!” But think of this: if God exists, and if he is truly all-powerful and infinite, that means that his love for us is literally infinite. It cannot be measured; it cannot be contained. And if this is really true, then each one of us is looked upon by God with a gaze of infinite and eternal love. We are destined to spend eternity with him free of everything contrary to our nature, destined
to be completely and perfectly fulfilled in the deepest core of our being, destined to become exactly what we were created to be! If that’s true, then it’s really, really good. Ridiculously good. And that’s exactly the truth that is revealed to us in the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. It IS true! Even in this life of trials, may we always rejoice in the indescribable beauty of our heavenly calling!