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.