He will never fail you but will help you in all your troubles, and you will find him everywhere. (St. Teresa of Jesus)
Category: trust in God
“At times it seems I am getting worse”
The beginning of the second chapter of Fr. Tadeusz Dajczer’s book, Amazing Nearness:
I get so disheartened. I am frequently in touch with the Lord, yet I am always falling away from Him. I am always falling in the same old way. At times it seems I am getting worse. Furthermore, it is He who is inviting me to follow and unite with Him. I am not starting it. He is. He is the way; He is lighting the way. He is the grace that leads me on. I know so little about this because He doesn’t want me to know His mysterious operations within me.
I ask how I can avoid getting so disheartened. Yet it is success that should really surprise me. I have to remember that the Lord only enters my heart through the failures that cause my spiritual emptiness. That is where faith comes in. He wants me to be inundated with problems so He can stay with me. Then I will want Him more and more.
I need to be patient with myself. He doesn’t get disheartened with me, so why should I get so upset? He loves me just as I am.
Fr. Dajczer, of course, is not condoning complacency here. We need to, of course, be quick to repent and try to change. But he recognizes that even as we try so hard, there are many times when we still fall. These are the times he is speaking about:
It is often hard for me to be forbearing [with myself], as I want everything immediately so that I am better than others. Yet God is not in a hurry. I am the hasty one with an interior hubbub. This impedes my spiritual progress. My impatience may look like zeal or even righteous indignation. I forget that this can be self-love or greed.
The answer, as always, is full surrender to Him, to His time and His plan. To be patient with ourselves and with Him. ” He wants me to be inundated with problems so He can stay with me. Then I will want Him more and more.”
Bring him to me
from Amy Carmichael:
Mt 17.17 Then Jesus answered and said, . . . “Bring him here to me.”
Have you a ‘him’ about whom you are anxious? Bring him to Me. Have you a ‘her’? Bring her to Me. We can even turn the pronoun to ‘it’–this crushing burden of the state of the world, the grief and misery that overwhelms us if we think at all–Bring it to Me. We can turn the word to ‘all’–the problems of our work with its cares and its questions, and more personal cares and anxieties too–Bring all to Me.
And there are joys, too. Don’t let us bring only griefs and anxieties, but also thanks and praises.
Bring him to Me.
Bring her to Me.
Bring it to Me.
Bring all to Me.
All times are in His hands
I don’t put my trust in the weather; I put my trust in God. All times are in His hands. We have had weeks of dryness, but even these speak to us of Him. This morning in Morning Prayer, we prayed these lines from Psalm 63: “My body pines for you like a dry, weary land without water.” May that be true of us; may we pine for Him, long for Him, like a dry, weary land without water.
Yet I took heart as we prayed the Canticle from Daniel this morning: “Cold and chill, bless the Lord. Dew and rain, bless the Lord.” All times are in His hands.
Friday: from the archives
(First posted October 7, 2009)
The Age Long Minute
The title of this post comes from a meditation by Amy Carmichael on Ps 107.29-30: He made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed. Then they were glad because they had quiet, and he brought them to their desired haven. I have to say that my first thought after reading Then they were glad because they had quiet, was: “This verse must mean a lot to parents of toddlers and teenagers!” Amy’s reflection was other–and deeper–than mine.
“Then they were glad because they had quiet;” the words were music to me. Then in reading the different stories of the Lord calming the sea, I found this: “He came to them . . . and meant to pass by them” [Mk 6.48]. The more literal the translation the more startling it is. As I pondered the matter I saw that this “age-long minute” was part of the spiritual preparation of these men for a life that at that time was unimagined by them–a life of dauntless faith and witness in the absence of any manifestation of the power of the Lord; and it must be the same today. Such minutes must be in our lives, unless our training is to be unlike that of ever saint and warrior who ever lived. Our “minute” may seem endless–”How long wilt Thou forget me,” cried David out of the depths of his–but perhaps looking back we shall in such an experience a great and shining opportunity. Words are spoken then that are spoken at no other time . . . We have a chance to prove our glorious God, to prove that His joy is strength and that His peace passeth all understanding, and to know the love of Christ that passeth knowledge.And the “minute” always ends in one way, there is no other ending recorded anywhere: “But immediately he spoke to them, and said, ‘Take heart, it is I; have no fear” . . . and the wind ceased” [Mk 6.50].
“Then they were glad because they had quiet; and he brought them to their desired haven.”
(Edges of His Ways, pp. 143-44)
If you feel that you are in “an age-long minute”, have hope–He is coming to you and will bring you to your desired haven.
1000 years is as one day
See this plant? It was grown from seeds brought back to life. No big deal, you might think. Well, the seeds were 32,000 years old! They “had been entirely encased in ice, were unearthed from 124 feet (38 meters) below the permafrost, surrounded by layers that included mammoth, bison, and woolly rhinoceros bones.” According to National Geographic: “A Russian team discovered a seed cache of Silene stenophylla, a flowering plant native to Siberia, that had been buried by an Ice Age squirrel near the banks of the Kolyma River. Radiocarbon dating confirmed that the seeds were 32,000 years old.”
Sooooooooo, if you are tempted to hopelessness about areas in your life that seem to be taking forever to change . . . or about people that you know whose lives seem irreparable, have hope! To the Lord, a thousand years is as one day, and as we well know, He can bring the dead to life. All in His own time . . .
The Shepherd knows what pastures are best for his sheep
From a devotional book first published in 1884. (Don’t you love old books?) Here is the entry for January the thirty-first.
Prov 3.6 In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make straight your paths.
Ps 23.2 He leads me.
In “pastures green”? Not always; sometimes He
Who knoweth best, in kindness leadeth me
In weary ways, where heavy shadows be.
So, whether on the hill-tops high and fair
I dwell, or in the sunless valleys, where
The shadows lie, what matter? He is there. (Henry H. Barry)
The Shepherd knows what pastures are best for his sheep, and they must not question nor doubt, but trustingly follow Him. Perhaps He sees that the best pastures for some of us are to be found in the midst of opposition or of earthly trials. If He leads you there, you may be sure they are green for you, and you will grow and be made strong by feeding there. Perhaps He sees that the best waters for you to walk beside will be raging waves of trouble and sorrow. If this should be the case, He will make them still waters for you, and you must go and lie down beside them, and let them have all their blessed influences upon you. (Hannah Whitehall Smith)
The sturdiness of God
Found on a slip of paper stuck in my catechism:
The Hebrew word for faith (emúnah) derives from the stem emeth, faithfulness, one of God’s greatest attributes. God is merciful and faithful (hesed we’ emeth, Gen 24.27). We might as well say, tender and tough. For emeth evokes the image of a rock on which we can lean or build. God will not move; we can always count on him. Our faith is the act of leaning on the toughness or ‘sturdiness’ of God. The liturgical word ‘Amen’ has the same stem. To say ‘Amen’ is above all to believe; it is the act of affirming the sturdiness of God as it comes through to us from his Word or from the person of Jesus. The Apocalypse of John says of Jesus that he is at once amen and pistos–faithful (Rev. 3.14). He is faithful in two directions. It is his privilege boundlessly and, as it were, recklessly to lean against his Father, because he as no other may count on his Father’s power and ‘sturdiness.’ Similarly in his relation to us he becomes the eminently sturdy and powerful one against whom we on our part may lean just as recklessly and boundlessly. (André Louf, Tuning Into Grace)
More lost than merry
We woke up to this kind of beauty this morning:
Then I opened my Magnificat Advent Companion to the reading for today. God’s timing is always amazing:
Spiritual White Out
The weather report said blizzard, but we heard adventure. A few days before Christmas, I headed down the shore with a friend, packing provisions and two golden retrievers in the SUV. The drive was challenging, the roadway slick, and the snowfall heavy. Within a half hour of our destination, we were driving in a white out. We both peered between the windshield wipers trying to figure out our location. The car’s GPS was no help, so I took out my iPad and hit an application to locate us. Technology knew where we were, and a blue dot guided us the rest of the way. While modern technology can guide us through weather storms, there are other storms that throw us off course. Illness, relationship problems, and financial concerns are hardly adventures. In those moments we can experience a kind of spiritual white out, uncertain where God is. The birth of Jesus is not a sentimental story. It is a radical promise that in sharing our life God knows exactly where we are. It is in the blizzards of your life, not a manger, that Jesus is born again. These days you may feel more lost than merry. You might wish for a computer application to help you find the way. Or you can believe that helping you find the way is the reason Jesus was born. (Msgr. Gregory E.S. Malovetz)
When we can’t understand
Often we find ourselves in situations where it is so difficult to understand what God is doing, why He is allowing some particular thing to happen, why it appears that Satan has the upper hand. Her is a bit of sage wisdom from Amy Carmichael which I trust will provide encouragement for any of you in those types of situations:
Some find it hard to believe that Satan (a conquered foe) can interfere in the affairs of a child of God. Yet we read of St. Paul earnestly endeavoring to do something and Satan hindering him [1 Thess 2.18]. The reason for Satan’s power was not prayerlessness. ‘Night and day am I praying with passionate earnestness that I may see your faces’ [1 Thess 3.10 Way]. Satan could not touch his spirit, his heart’s affections, or any other vital thing in him, but he could so order events that the apostle could not do for these children of his love all that he longed to do. He could only write letters. He could not be with them
And in the familiar 2 Cor 12.7, we have a still stranger thing, a messenger from Satan allowed to do bodily hurt, and allowed to continue to hurt, we are not told for how long.
So it is clear that there are activities in the Unseen which are not explained to us. Every now and then the curtain between is drawn aside for a moment, and we see. But it is soon drawn back again.
Only this we know: ‘On the day I called, thou didst answer me, my strength of soul thou didst increase’ [v. 3]. If that be so what does anything matter? Oh, to use all disappointments, delays and trials of faith and patience as St. Paul used his. What golden gain came to our glorious Lord because of these experiences. And see how he closes this letter to the Thessalonians which is so full of human longing: ‘The very God of peace sanctify you wholly: and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is He that calls you, Who also shall do it’ [1 Thess 5.23,24]. Faithful is He: He will do it.” (AC, Edges, pp. 141-142)
Witnesses to Hope 