See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are… Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. No child asks to be born. A child is given life because of the love of the parents. It is love that brings life into the family. In a similar way we are members of the family of God because of love. We didn’t do, can’t do, anything to earn it or deserve it. God gives us life, God brings us into the family of God just as we are because of love. “We are God’s children now.” It is for this reason that everyone must be treated with utmost dignity and respect. Pope Leo echoes Pope Francis and the constant teaching of the Church to make sure that we include in particular those on the margins, on the peripheries of society, into our circle of care. The poor, the immigrant, those discriminated against, minorities are all “God’s children now.” However, there is a “not yet” to being part of the divine family. We don’t always see the loving presence God created us to be. “What we shall be” is obscured by the mists of time. But we have a foretaste of the longed for future when we live each day by seeing in the faces around us a reflection of God’s glory.
