Why Not Trust God?

Recently in prayer, I’ve come to realize that I often slip into the same feeling of being stuck in a revolving door. And let me explain what I mean by this. A door is something that separates two different sides: the side you left and the side you entered. Hard stuff to understand, I know. But the difference with a revolving door is that you are constantly rotating between sides until you finally choose to stop circling and pick one. As a child, I would only stop going around and around again when I ran out of energy or became too dizzy. And let’s be real, it’s still fun to run around in a revolving door..but back to how this relates to prayer!

Abandonment to the Lord’s will and a lack of trust that His plans are better than my own are the two sides I’ve been rotating between. There are days when I’m able to live in joyful surrender. During those times, I’m filled with both peace and bliss as I know that God is in control. After all, He is the one who created our hearts and blessed each one with different desires. Why wouldn’t we trust that He is a good Father who hears the cries of His little ones? But, more often than not, I push the door around again to end up in despair as I realize that those intentions I’ve been praying years for have not been answered. It’s easy for me to doubt when I can only see one tile of a whole beautiful mosaic. And the cycle continues as I receive consolations in prayer and know that the Lord Lord has me where He wants me.

What I truly desire in life is to exit this revolving door, because I’m tired and dizzy. I’m tired of growing impatient with the Lord when He always waits so patiently for me to place my trust in Him again and again. I desire to be selfless, yet I selfishly hold onto what I think my life should look like. My heart is ready to abandon all that I am and have in order to be an instrument for the Lord to use, but my will isn’t quite there yet.

In the end, I think it’s important to be patient with ourselves. After all, we are only human. But praise God, because we have the Blessed Virgin Mary as a model to imitate. There is no better example than Our Lady when it comes to abandoning everything in order to fully embrace the Lord’s plans for our lives. In Luke 1: 38, Mary’s fiat is the most powerful yes in history. Our lives are completely changed because of one woman and the courage she had to blindly trust the plans that God had for her. Our Lady didn’t know the extent of love she would experience with her son Jesus or the horrendous suffering she would endure during his passion and death on the cross. Mary had no idea what her yes would entail, but she had faith. And that was enough.

The same holds true for our lives as we don’t know what the Lord has planned. We can guess all day long and think about what we want the future to look like, but our Lord is here with us in the present moment. In the words of St. Gianna Beretta Molla, “As to the past, let us entrust it to God’s mercy, the future to divine providence. Our task is to live holy the present moment.” So let us abandon our plans, desires, and everything we hold onto to divine mercy. May we be blessed with an unshakable faith that allows us to trust even during the darkest of moments. And may we never forget that our resurrected Lord has already paved the way to salvation for each one of us!

Most Immaculate Heart of Mary and St. Gianna Beretta Molla, please pray for us!!

- Mary Dillenburg