Saturday, June 24, 2017

Trust God and be not afraid

LIFE always has more to offer to us than what we can
understand, let alone, cope. And they can come in all shapes and
sizes, good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant, likeable and hateful.
There are surprises and moments when we seem to rot in expectation and
still things we long for don’t come.

             In the face of all this, I believe the attitude to have
and the reaction to make is to be calm, pray hard, and while we do all
we can, we have to learn to live a certain sense of abandonment in the
hands of God.

             In those situations, I believe we just have to allow
ourselves to play in God’s game plan, in his abiding providence whose
designs are beyond reckoning, are way beyond comprehension and
appreciation.

             We have to know when to be afraid and when not. We have to
distinguish between a good fear and a bad fear, a healthy one and a
sick one. We need to know how to handle and deal with our fears that
are unavoidable in our life.
  
            Fear is an emotion that we need to educate also. It just
cannot be on its own, guided only by our spontaneous judgments and
reactions, and appearing when it’s not supposed to, and not appearing
when it’s supposed to. It has to be grounded and oriented properly,
expressing the sublimity of our dignity as persons and children of
God.
  
            In this life, we need to develop a sportsman’s attitude,
since life is like a game. Yes, life is like a game, because we set
out to pursue a goal, we have to follow certain rules, we are given
some means, tools and instruments, we train and are primed to win and
do our best, but defeats can always come, and yet, we just have to
move on.
  
            It would be unsportsmanlike if we allow ourselves to get
stuck with our defeats and failures, developing a loser’s mentality.
That would be the epic fail that puts a period and a finis in an
ongoing narrative, when a comma, a colon or a semi-colon would have
sufficed.
  
            We need a sporting spirit because life’s true failure can
come only when we choose not to have hope. That happens when our
vision and understanding of things is narrow and limited, confined
only to the here and now and ignorant of the transcendent reality of
the spiritual and supernatural world.

             This should be the attitude to have. It’s an attitude that
can only indicate our unconditional faith and love for God who is
always in control of things, and at the same time can also leave us in
peace and joy even at the worst of the possibilities.
  
            Remember the Book of Ecclesiastes where it says that for
everything there is a season, “a time to be born, and a time to die; a
time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill,
and a time to heal…” But everything is under God’s control, and even
if we are capable of eternity, we just the same “cannot find out what
God has done from the beginning to the end.” (3,1ff) We just have to
trust him.
  
            We have to follow the example of the many characters in
the gospel who, feeling helpless in the many predicaments they were
in, earnestly rushed to Christ for some succor. They went to him
unafraid and unashamed and they got what they wanted.

             It may happen that we may not get what we want. And in
this, we should not be too surprised or too worried. What is sure is
that God always listens and gives us what is best for us.
  
            If our request is granted, it’s because it is good for us.
If our request is not granted, it could be because what we asked is
actually not good for us. Examples of this kind of cases are aplenty,
and many would later on realize how lucky they were that what they
asked for was not granted.


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