By Fr. Roy Cimagala
INDEED, we always have to be open to God’s will and ways that oftentimes can be quite challenging and unattractive, since they demand everything from us. They require a lot of sacrifice. We just have to realize as quickly as possible that this is the language of real love. God gives us his all. We should also learn to give our all to him. As a saying goes: Love is repaid with love.
This truth of our faith is somehow highlighted when Christ gave this apparently harsh response to somehow who expressed his desire to follow him. “Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head.” (Mt 8,20)
When we truly love and follow Christ, we would have complete trust in his will and ways, regardless of the cost it asks of us. We know that his providence never fails. And the unavoidable suffering we can encounter along the way are actually golden occasions for us to learn some precious lessons, to grow in some virtues, and in the end to make ourselves more and more like Christ which is actually the purpose of our life here on earth.
We should just be ready for wherever God’s providence would take us. We have to be open to it all the time. Even as we make our plans and pursue them truly as our own, we should not forget that nothing in our life is actually outside the providence of God who can adapt himself to us, even in our worst situations and predicaments, and still lead us to himself.
The only thing to remember is that God is always around and is actually intervening and directing our life to him. That is part of his omnipotence which he exercises both from all eternity and in time since our creation and all the way to the end of time.
We need to be open to his providence, because even if God is 100% responsible for our life, we too, in a manner of speaking, are also 100% responsible for ours. Since we have been created in God’s image and likeness, we cannot help but have our life immersed also in God’s life. We need to learn to live our life with him as consciously and as freely as possible with him. We are in some kind of divine adventure.
The secret of achieving this ideal is to develop the instinct of always looking for Christ. This is a basic duty of ours, a grave responsibility in fact. Without Christ, we would just be on our own, relying simply on our own lights and powers that, no matter how excellent, can never accomplish our real ultimate need—our own salvation, our own completion and perfection as a person, as a child of God.
We have to learn to look for Christ. He is the pattern of our humanity, the redeemer of our damaged humanity. In fact, the goal that we should try to pursue with God’s grace, of course, but also with our own effort, is for us to be ‘another Christ,’ a clearly supernatural phenomenon that will require us to be at least open to it and to merit it.
This looking for Christ should be our constant behavior. We have to look for him, so we can find him, and in finding him, we can start to love and serve him which is what we are expected to do to be ‘another Christ.’
Email: roycimagala@gmail.com
