My Will Be Done

"There is so much unbelief in the world, for too many people speak of God unworthily and never stop finding fault with His activities in a manner they would never dare use toward the most incompetent workman.  What we really want to do is restrict His work so that it conforms to the rules and boundaries that our limited reason considers suitable.  We try to improve and do nothing but complain and grumble.  Yet we are surprised at the way the Jews treated Jesus Christ!  Ah! when I think of God's love, His adorable will, His unerring acts, I cannot believe how He is treated.  How can the will of God be unreasonable?  How can it ever be wrong?  Yet we say: "There's this bit of business of mine.  I need this.  What I want has been taken from me.  My neighbor is hindering the good works I want to do.  Now, isn't this quite unreasonable?  And, on top of it all, I fall ill just when I should be fit...."

Thus the words I read this morning from Abandonment to Divine Providence, words that seem altogether fitting as I struggle with a cold that seems to have sucked away all my strength.  I have so little time at home these days that I think I ought to feel well so I can accomplish all that must be done.  Yet apparently my Lord wills otherwise.

How much I find myself falling into the trap of willing what He wills only so long as it fits within the breadth of what I wish.  I begin to float along, thinking I have abandoned myself, and then all of a sudden I come up abruptly against some great wall before me that halts me at once, preventing me from following my desired course and forcing me to follow another.  Sometimes I think He allows such things just to remind me that I must want His will because it is His will and not merely because it pleases me.

Yes, I must will as He wills, unite my will to His.  Nothing else matters.  Nothing else is important.  In the words of de Caussade:

"...Now let me tell you that the will of God is all that is necessary, and what it does not give you is of no use to you at all.  My friends, you lack nothing.  You would be very ashamed if you know what the experiences you call setbacks, upheavals, pointless disturbances, and tedious annoyances really are.  You would realize that your complaints about them are nothing more nor less than blasphemies—though that will never occur to you.  Nothing happens to you except by the will of God, and yet His beloved children curse it because they do not know it for what it is."

How true!  We do not know that His will is His love.  We are still spoiled children who think that love is giving us exactly what we want.

It came to my heart that He must love me very much to deprive me of what I so greatly desire and to allow to happen to me what I find unpleasant.  For who does not desire to give that child, no matter how spoiled, exactly what he wishes?  Even more must my Lord desire to give me that for which I ask and that for which I dare not ask.  Yet one thing restrains Him: His love for me alone.  For He loves me not only enough to suffer in my place, but He loves me enough to let me suffer.  That is surely true love.