Encompassed by His Love

Sometimes in life we have to go through really hard times.  Sometimes it's consequences for sins committed (which can take years to play out) and sometimes it's for no apparent reason.  Often we may be tempted to whine and complain about it.  Other times we seem to be able to suck it up and bear it.  So what is God doing to us, visiting calamities on us and surrounding us with misery to the point we want to find a hole, crawl in, and pull the entrance in after us? 

In today's meditation by Father Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalene, O.C.D. in Divine Intimacy he writes:

 In all the circumstances of our life, even the saddest and mot painful, we are always encompassed by His love.  God's love can will nothing but good; even when He leads us by the harsh, rough road of suffering, He is infallibly willing our good.

God "makes us die and makes us live.... He scourges us and He saves us" (cf. 1 Sm. 2:6; Tb. 13:2), always because of His love.  Thus it is not rare that He strikes hardest those whom He loves most, for as the Holy Spirit says, "...acceptable men [are tried] in the furnace of humiliation" (Sir. 2:5).

St. Teresa of Jesus says: This suffering "is what the Father gave to Him whom He loved most of all [Jesus].... These, then are His gifts in the world.  He gives them in proportion to the love He bears us.  He gives more to those He loves most and less to those He loves least" (Way 32).

 In one of her books St. Teresa recounted a particularly grueling journey on which many things went wrong, the weather was terrible, etc.  She said something like, "Lord, if this is the way You treat Your friends, no wonder you have so few of them."

I liked this quote because it showed her humanness and sense of humor in the midst of adversity. Most of all, hard times are an invitation to trust in God and submit to His will, to take the cotton out of our ears and listen to Him.  He is in charge and He is polishing us up for heaven, even if we can't see the reasons why we are suffering.