“But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
that you may be children of your heavenly Father.” // Matthew 5:44-45
For Christmas last year my best friend gave me a tiny book with an intriguing title. Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence: The Secret of Peace and Happiness did not, upon my first reading, seem like it could possibly live up to the claims of its name. Certainly not the subtitle anyway.
The authors, one a priest and the other a Saint, make a compelling case based on Scripture that everything that happens in our lives, good or bad, is specifically willed by God for our own good, and will sanctify us if we will let it. In the case of the bad, we are to see every circumstance—from inclement weather to illness to persecutions to crimes committed against us—as exactly what God wishes us to be experiencing in that moment. He does not will the sins committed by us or by others, but He does will the consequences of those actions in our lives in order that we would benefit from them in eternity.
All of that, I came to see as . . . certainly possible, not unreasonable, fitting to the perfections of God, and supported by Scripture (see Hebrews 12:5-7, Isaiah 10:5-6, Lamentations 3:37-39, Job 1:21, John 18:11, 2 Corinthians 11:22-30). But even if I could resign myself to this new way of seeing, how could it be anything other than a hopeless drudgery in practice?
But, as I began to try to experience the circumstances of my day as willed by God and for my own good, I was shocked at how . . . liberating it was. All of a sudden, everything felt different: the carefully sorted craft supplies that my four-year-old inexplicably decided to dump into one giant pile, the night on which three different children barfed all over three different rooms, a person who had misled and mistreated me, grief and loss, last minute changes to my careful plans—I could experience it all not as chaos and failure, but as what God wanted for me in that moment.
I think it might be the secret of peace and happiness, after all.
What trials will you endure today, and how might God be at work through them for your good?
Kendra Tierney Norton is grateful to be a wife, mother, and stepmother. She lives in the wilds of unincorporated Los Angeles County in a big old fixer-upper house with her husband and a varying number of their combined fourteen children, plus one fish, two cats, and twenty chickens. She likes to say that her goal is keeping Catholicism weird. To that end, she is the author of books including the Catholic All Year Compendium: Liturgical Living for Real Life with Ignatius Press and O Come, Emmanuel: Advent Reflections on the Jesse Tree for Families with Emmaus Road Publishing, the creator of the TV series Catholic All Year At Home on FORMED, and the CEO of Catholic All Year, an apostolate dedicated to helping parents live out their Catholic faith and pass it along to their children.
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