Take refuge beneath the hand that corrects you. Dont avoid discipline because the one who is correcting you cannot make a mistake. The one who made you knows what to make of you. Or perhaps you think him so unskilled an artisan that he knew how to make you but forgets what he might make of you? Before you existed, he thought of you, because if he had not thought of you, you would never have existed. If he thought of you before you existed so that you would exist, now that you exist, continue, live, serve him, will he scorn you, despise you? (Augustine, Sermon 21, 8; PL 38, 147)

Rev. Joseph A. Komonchak, professor emeritus of the School of Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America, is a retired priest of the Archdiocese of New York.

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