Christ always looks after us

WE should just firm up our conviction about how Christ is always caring for us. His ways may be mysterious and can escape our notice, but we should not forget that there is no moment in our life when Christ would be absent or indifferent to our needs. 

 We are reminded of this truth of our faith in that gospel episode about the third appearance of Christ to his disciples after his resurrection. (cfr. Jn 21,1-19) At first, they did not realize it was Christ who was asking them something from the shore when they were fishing at sea. It took some time before they would finally recognize him. 

 In our life, we should be wary of our tendency to feel that we are just on our own, grappling with our own things and that Christ has hardly anything to do with us. We have to correct that understanding. Christ always cares for us and he is precisely in everything that we get involved in, giving us the proper direction, guidance and support. 

 We should always remember that Christ takes care of everything. And even from evil, he would know how to derive some good. With him, everything, including our failures and sins, would always work for the good. His wisdom, his omnipotence, his mercy, etc. would take care of all that. 

 The crucial thing to do is to be with Christ, which definitely will require some discipline from us. And so, even if especially at the beginning, we would find it hard, if not almost impossible to be with him, we just have to do what we can to achieve that ideal condition for us. In time, and with faith and our unrelenting effort, to be with Christ is not only achievable, but something that can become a stable state of life for us. Again, let’s remember that we are actually meant for that state of life. 

 We can be sure that on the part of Christ, everything is made available, so that whatever difficulty and problem we have in this life, we would know how to leverage them to our real and lasting advantage, and not just some false and passing advantage. 

 Obviously, we have to do our part. In fact, we have to exhaust all human means to resolve whatever difficulties and problems we have. But knowing that our best would never be enough, we should never forget that there is God, our Father, our Creator, who began something good in us and who will also be the one to finish, complete and perfect everything in us. (cfr. Phil 1,6) 

 We have to strengthen our conviction on this wonderful truth of our faith. We should not allow ourselves to be dominated by sadness, much less, despair over some weakness, mistakes, failures, blunders and sins that can mark our earthly sojourn. 

 While it’s true that our initial reaction to these negative things can unavoidably be one of sadness, let us not stay long there. We have to immediately recover our true dignity as children of God. Being a father, God would always understand and forgive us. 

 God will never give up on us. He will do everything to help and save us. As St. Paul would put it in his Letter to the Romans: “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (8,32)

Training for eternal life

KNOWING that we are meant for eternal life with God in heaven, we should understand that our life here on earth is meant to train us for that ultimate goal of ours. It is also a testing ground to see if what God wants us to be for all eternity is also what we ourselves would want to be. 

 Of course, what God wants us to be is to be like him since we have been created in his image and likeness, meant to be share in very life and nature. And that means that, in the end, just as God is love itself, as shown in its fulness by Christ, we should try our best to incarnate and live that love which is all inclusive even as it continues to keep the exclusivity of truth. It’s also a love that oozes with mercy. 

 We obviously can only do so much, given our natural limitations, not to mention the wounded condition of our life that is always hounded by sin. But we just have to do what we can, taking things to the limit, never saying enough. Anyway, Christ has assured us of final victory as long as we stick with him all the way to the end, regardless of how the drama of our life plays out. 

 Let’s always remember these reassuring words of St. Paul: “He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” (Phil 1,6) We should just try our best to be more and more like Christ, even if our best can never be enough. 

 To be more and more like Christ, to be more and more like God can only mean to be more and more in love with God, to be more and more united with him. And in practical terms, it means to be more and more in love and united with everybody else, irrespective of how they are. That’s because to love God here on earth is also to love everybody else. 

 Said in another way, if we really want love to reign between God and us, all we have to do is to love our neighbor. In this we have these words of Christ himself: “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop condemning and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven…For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.” (Lk 6,36-38) 

 Thus, when Christ was asked what the greatest commandment was, he readily said it was to love God with everything that we have got, and without being asked what the second greatest commandment was, he volunteered to say it—that it was to love your neighbor as yourself. (cfr. Mt 22,36-40) 

 As we can see, loving God and loving others always go together. We cannot have one without the other. The immediate corollary we can derive from this consideration is that we do not have to wait for some special occasions, some special reasons or persons to show our love for God. 

 Every moment, every person, every situation, no matter how ordinary and plain they may be, is a moment to show our love for God. The moment we start to be nice to others, we are already starting to be nice with God, and thus loving him. 

 This is how we can effectively train ourselves for eternal life!

God’s providence in our work

MAY 1, Feast of St. Joseph the Worker. In the secular world, it’s celebrated as Labor Day, highlighting the importance of our work in the development of our society and, first of all, of our personal life. Yes, our work plays a very important and strategic role in the different aspect and levels of our life. 

 What we need to realize more deeply is that God’s constant interventions in our life, that is, his providence and governance over all his creation, is played out most especially in our work, where our human and world development takes place. 

 We need to convince ourselves that our life and everything in it, including our work especially, is not an isolated and unrelated element in the very fluid ocean of the universe. We are always a vital part of a whole plan of God’s love and wisdom, a verse in the divine epic of the continuing work of God over all of his creation. 

 We have to overcome our tendency to have a very restrictive, narrow and shallow view of our life, ruled solely by mere human estimation of things, worldly standards and criteria, instead of our faith that gives us the complete vision of things and the adequate means to reach our ultimate end. 

 This realization should behoove us to develop a most sensitive ability to discern God’s interventions as we go through our work. We should be guided by God’s abiding interventions rather than simply by our own ideas, no matter how brilliant they may appear to be. 

 Yes, we have to learn to work and, in fact, to live our whole life under God’s providence. As our Catechism puts it, providence are “the dispositions by which God guides his creation toward their perfection…By his providence God protects and governs all things which he has made…(n. 302) 

 Furthermore, the Catechism says that “the solicitude of divine providence is concrete and immediate; God cares for all, from the least things to the great events of the world and its history.” (n. 303) 

 We should try our best to correspond to God’s constant presence and interventions. That is why, we need to cultivate our spiritual life, our relation with God which is otherwise called as our religion, that has to be constantly nourished through a life of piety that should be kept as vibrant as possible. 

 Otherwise, there is no other way but for us to fall into self-indulgence that has no other possible end than tragedy. We would be easy prey to our weaknesses, the many temptations around and sin itself. 

 That is why the Catechism tells us that “Jesus asks for childlike abandonment to the providence of our heavenly Father who takes care of his children’s smallest needs.” (n. 305). We should not dare to live solely on our own, something that we need effort to uphold, since our tendency is to think that we can simply be on our own. 

 We just have to learn and develop a healthy sense of abandonment in the mysterious will and ways of God. What can help in this regard is to cultivate also a sporting attitude to life. We win some, we lose some, but in the end, God takes care of everything as long as we always go to him! 

 The upshot of all these considerations should be that we develop a working contemplative lifestyle especially as we immerse ourselves in our work. That way, we can easily discern God’s providential interventions as we tackle the technical aspects and the other temporal factors of our work.