Trust God Always: God Only Wants What’s Best for Us!
On our life’s journey we have to learn to trust God. This is especially true when we are faced with an ongoing painful life experience. Trusting God rests on the truth that our loving God would never hurt us. In fact, it’s unfathomable to believe that God, our creator, isn’t on our side assisting our destiny in all our moments of joy or pain.
God loves us too much to do anything which harms us. Instead, God lovingly invites each of us to follow him. Every experience God gives us, and every person God puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for our future, which only God can see.
In the end, we are reconciled with God our Father through the death of Jesus. Many more are saved through Jesus’ life and teachings! Remember, Jesus spent his lifetime inviting all who listened to join him.
Thomas Merton wrote, “The whole climate of the New Testament witnesses the flowering of ordinary possibilities hidden in everyday life. God’s advent hinges on our receptivity, our yes, to the invitation to let love come alive via these fragile earthen vessels.”
What Thomas Merton is suggesting, since we are reconciled with Jesus’ Father, let us celebrate by living our lives to the fullest. We do this by following the message Jesus preached when he walked the roads of Galilee and Jericho. Simply put, Jesus is asking since we are saved, let’s live like we’re saved. St. Francis de Sales says it this way, “Thank you Lord for everything. I ask for one thing more, a grateful heart.”
In God, our perfection means there is always room for improvement. Jesus coached his followers with this recommendation, “Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect” means becoming better than we are presently. Jesus says this with the hope that every listener would live each year working on their perfection and gradually growing in holiness.
The late Jesuit priest, Walter Burghardt, saw becoming holy as “A long and loving look at the real.” Fr. Burghardt’s real is distinctly known as: “living, pulsating people, fire and ice, and the sun setting over the Rocky Mountains.” His real would also include a new-born deer sprinting through the forest, a sparkling glass of champagne, a child lapping his chocolate ice-cream, and a woman walking with windblown hair. Spiritual growth entails a long and loving look at our real just to see them. Holiness is found reposing in the real.
In the movie, The Color Purple, Shug comments, “It pisses God off when we walk through the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t even notice it.” However, remember the real doesn’t always cause delight. The real also includes sin, suffering, illness, and death.
Jesus was always moved by the pain and suffering of others. It tugged at his heart and moved him to reach out in a healing or forgiving way. The pursuit of the holy doesn’t transport us to some magical city, but it helps us to appreciate the holy ground we find surrounding us in the here and now. It is here where our trusting in God multiplies and deepens.
