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Much of our spiritual life is based on a simple action: trust. We are called to trust in God, but it isn’t always that easy. To trust God entails a certain abandonment, putting more faith in God than in ourselves.
Blessed Michael Sopocko, spiritual director and confessor of St. Faustina, urged others to trust in God, but recognized why we are so often hesitant. He wrote, “Natural trust — the expectation of human help — is a great incentive in men’s lives … But to expect help from men often leads to disappointment.” This disappointment we feel when our trust is broken by others can shape the way we trust God. We become hesitant to trust God, as we begin to think that we can’t trust anyone.
However, Sopocko writes, “Those who trust God, on the other hand, are never disappointed … Anyone who expects God to help him is thereby acknowledging that God is almighty and good, that He can help us, and wants to do so, and that He is, above all else, merciful. ‘No one is good but only God’ (Mark 10:18). We must know God in truth, for a false knowledge of Him chills our relationship with Him and obstructs the graces of His Mercy.”
Trusting God is not easy, but we must keep in mind that God is perfect goodness and mercy. He wills our good and only permits that which will bring us closer to him. God isn’t a god like Zeus, waiting to strike us down, but instead is a God of mercy, ready to receive us back into the fold. This is why we should trust God and not doubt his mysterious ways.
Sopocko encourages us to trust in God, comparing our trust to God to holding on a chain from Heaven.
Trust, then, may be compared with a chain hanging from Heaven and to which we attach our souls. God’s hand draws the chain upward; as it ascends, it carries with it all who hang on tightly. Let us, then, cling to this chain in time of prayer, like the blind man of Jericho, who, sitting by the roadside, cried out with a loud voice: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Let us trust God in all our needs, temporal and eternal – in all our sufferings, dangers and derelictions. Let us trust Him, even when it seems as though He Himself has abandoned us; when He withholds His consolations, leaves our prayers unanswered, crushes us beneath a heavy cross. It is then that we should trust God most, for this is the time of trial, the testing time, through which every soul must pass.
One of the greatest prayers that we can pray was revealed to St. Faustina and is inscribed under every image of Divine Mercy: “Jesus, I trust in you!”
Read more:
A visual guide to praying the Divine Mercy Chaplet
Read more:
Here is St. Faustina’s description of her Guardian Angel
And today we celebrate...