Nothing exists independently of God. The universe did not simply receive its existence from him at the beginning of time and then continue on its own. At every moment God sustains everything he has created. Every star in the heavens and every human life continues to exist because he wills it to exist. As St. John Paul II observed, God’s sustaining action can be understood, in a certain sense, as a continual creation. If he were to withdraw his creative power for even an instant, everything would return to nothingness.

The same God who sustains the universe also governs it through his providence. Jesus teaches us to see him not as a distant power but as our Father. He points to the birds of the air, which are fed by God, and to the flowers of the field, which he clothes with beauty, and reminds us that we are worth far more than they are. Nothing escapes God’s attention, and nothing that concerns us is too insignificant for his care. We do not live in an indifferent universe governed ultimately by blind chance. We live under the providence of a Father who knows us better than we know ourselves and loves us more than we can imagine.

This truth should shape the way we understand our lives. We naturally make plans and form ideas about what will make us happy. We hope for good health and satisfying work, and we want our relationships to flourish. There is nothing wrong with these desires, but our vision is necessarily limited. We see only a small part of our earthly journey, whereas God sees the whole of our life and the eternity for which he created us. We tend to judge events by their immediate consequences; he sees them in the light of our sanctification and eternal happiness.

We therefore need to learn to recognize and embrace the will of God. We encounter his will clearly in his commandments, in the teaching of the Church and in the duties that belong to our vocation. We also encounter his providence in circumstances we did not choose and cannot change. This does not mean that everything that happens is positively willed by God. We live in a fallen world in which illness, accidents, human mistakes and sin have real consequences. God permits many things that he does not directly will. Yet nothing lies outside his providence, and there is no situation from which he cannot bring good.

Our Lord’s teaching about anxiety must be understood in this light. When he tells us not to worry about tomorrow, he is not encouraging irresponsibility. We have duties to fulfil, decisions to make and problems to solve, and we should use all the intelligence and practical means God has given us. If we are ill, we seek appropriate medical care. If we are looking for employment, we make a serious effort to find work. A student who hopes to succeed must study. Trust in God never excuses us from doing what reasonably lies within our power. Once we have done what we can, however, we should learn to entrust the outcome to him. Worry gives us no greater control over the future and often prevents us from carrying out our present duties with the peace of those who know that they are children of God.

Things will inevitably go wrong. We become ill, plans fall through, relationships become difficult, and our work does not always produce the results we expected. Ordinary days bring smaller contradictions when we are delayed, interrupted or inconvenienced. None of these things may form part of the day we would have planned for ourselves, but they can all become part of our path to God. Instead of remaining absorbed in the question of why something has happened, we can try to discover how God wants us to respond. We may need to be patient with someone who has inconvenienced us, accept that our plans have changed, or carry a difficulty whose purpose we cannot understand. Whatever the circumstances, we can turn our response into an act of love.

Christian acceptance does not require us to pretend that suffering is pleasant or that disappointment does not hurt. Jesus himself wept at the tomb of Lazarus and experienced terrible anguish in Gethsemane. Faith does not ask us to deny reality. It gives us the much greater hope that suffering need never be meaningless when it is united to Christ. We may not understand why God permits a particular cross, but we can know that he remains present within it and that his power to bring good is greater than the evil or suffering we experience.

One of the greatest obstacles to this trust is our tendency to assume that we know what is best for us. We make our plans and can unconsciously expect God to help us carry them out. Providence then becomes, in our minds, God’s assistance in accomplishing what we have already decided should happen. In reality, we are the ones who must learn to enter into his plan. When events take a different course from what we expected, we may think that something has gone wrong when God’s plan may simply be different from ours.

This requires humility because we cannot see our lives as God sees them. What appears to us as a setback may become the means by which our intentions are purified or our faith strengthened. A failure may reveal something about ourselves that success had concealed, or a disappointment may force us to reconsider priorities that had gradually become distorted. We will not always recognize the good immediately, and sometimes we may never see it clearly in this life.

Our Lord used the image of the vine to describe something of this action of God. A branch that already bears fruit is pruned so that it may bear more. The cutting is real, but the gardener does not intend to harm the vine. He knows what will help it flourish. We should not apply this image simplistically to every misfortune, as though every illness or tragedy had been individually sent by God as a spiritual treatment. Nevertheless, it teaches us that what initially appears to us as loss can sometimes become fruitful in ways we could not have foreseen.

The supreme example is the Passion of Christ. On Good Friday everything appeared to have ended in catastrophe. Jesus had been betrayed, unjustly condemned and crucified. His disciples had fled, and the One in whom they had placed all their hope lay dead. Humanly speaking, evil appeared to have triumphed. Yet through the Passion and death of Christ, God accomplished the redemption of the world. The greatest evil ever committed—the rejection and killing of the Son of God—became the occasion from which God brought the greatest good bestowed upon humanity. The evil itself did not become good, but God’s wisdom and power were so great that evil could not defeat his saving purpose.

This mystery gives us the foundation for one of the most consoling statements in Sacred Scripture: “For those who love God, all things work together for good” (Romans 8:28). St. Paul does not tell us that all things are good. Illness, injustice, sin and death remain evils, and God is never the author of moral evil. The promise is that nothing can ultimately frustrate his purposes for those who love him. He can take even what is painful, unjust or apparently meaningless and incorporate it into his providential plan. Calvary assures us that evil never has the final word.

Trust in Providence must therefore be joined to personal responsibility. We cannot blame God for consequences that arise from our own negligence and then call them his will. If we fail to prepare properly, act imprudently or neglect an obvious duty, we need to acknowledge our responsibility and learn from what happened. God expects us to use the intelligence and talents he has given us. We should plan carefully, work conscientiously and take reasonable precautions. Abandonment to God begins after, not instead of, the fulfilment of our responsibilities.

Even when we have acted responsibly, however, our efforts may not produce the results we hoped for. We can work hard and still fail. We may devote ourselves generously to helping another person and see little apparent change. Parents can make great sacrifices for their children and later wonder how much good they accomplished. Those engaged in apostolate may work for years without seeing the conversions or spiritual growth for which they have prayed. In such situations, we need to remember that we see only a small part of what God is doing.

A seed can remain hidden beneath the earth for a long time before any growth becomes visible. Something similar often happens in the spiritual life. A conversation that seemed to have little effect may remain in someone’s memory and bear fruit years later, while a prayer offered for another person may obtain graces that we will never know about in this life. We cannot measure the supernatural value of what we do solely by visible results. Our task is to use the human and supernatural means available to us, to work well and to remain faithful. The fruit belongs to God.

This perspective also helps us understand failure. The deepest purpose of our life is not success but holiness. We naturally attach importance to our projects, and rightly so, but God is concerned above all with the person we are becoming through them. A failure may teach us something that success could never have taught us. It may expose an excessive reliance on ourselves, purify our motives or redirect our life in a way that we recognize only much later. Looking back, we can sometimes see that a door which once seemed painfully closed prevented us from following a path that would not have been good for us. We should not expect to discover a neat explanation for everything, but experience can teach us that our first judgment about an event is not always the final one.

We need the same confidence when confronting our own weakness. After years of spiritual struggle, we may be discouraged to find ourselves still battling faults that we thought we would have overcome long ago. Perhaps we expected to be more patient or generous by now, yet we continue to discover how easily selfishness enters into our motives and how distracted we can be in prayer. This can be humbling, but it need not discourage us. God has always known our weakness, and sometimes our continued awareness of it protects us from the illusion that holiness is something we can achieve through our own strength.

God can even bring good from sins that have been sincerely repented of. This does not make sin good or diminish its seriousness. Yet a fall can teach us truths about ourselves that we had resisted seeing. We may become less self-confident, more understanding of the weakness of others and more aware of our absolute need for God’s mercy. If we return to him sincerely, our failure does not have to be the end of the story. God can take even what we have done badly and draw from it a deeper humility and dependence upon him.

Christian optimism rests on this confidence. It is not the belief that everything will turn out as we would like, nor is it simply a cheerful temperament. Life includes real suffering, and some difficulties remain with us for a long time. We are optimistic because God is our Father and because his grace is greater than our weakness. Our hope rests in his strength rather than our own. Even when we fail, we can repent, get up and begin again.

This understanding of Providence should enter into the small circumstances of everyday life. Much of our spiritual struggle takes place not in great tragedies but in ordinary contradictions. We are delayed when we are in a hurry, something breaks when we need it, our plans have to be changed, or we receive an unexpected criticism. Such things may be objectively insignificant, but our response to them matters. We can complain and allow them to disturb us, or we can accept them with good humour and offer the small sacrifice to God. Most of us are rarely asked for extraordinary acts of heroism, but every day gives us opportunities to love God through circumstances we did not choose.

It also helps us not to take ourselves too seriously. We will make mistakes, misjudge situations and occasionally look foolish. Charles Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, once remarked that if he could teach the whole world one lesson, it would be to learn how to laugh at oneself. There is genuine wisdom in this. Much unnecessary unhappiness comes from being excessively concerned with our plans, our competence and the impression we make on others. When we can smile at our own limitations, we are acknowledging the simple truth that we are creatures. God knows perfectly well whom he is dealing with, and our weakness does not prevent him from carrying out his plans.

The words omnia in bonum—all things work together for good—can gradually become part of the way we interpret our lives. When something goes wrong, they remind us that the difficulty has not escaped God’s providence. When we succeed, they help us remember that everything good ultimately comes from him. When we fail, they give us confidence to acknowledge what went wrong, learn what we can and begin again. They do not mean that everything that happens is good, nor do they ask us to accept injustice passively or neglect problems that we have a duty to remedy. They express our conviction that evil and suffering never have the final word because nothing lies beyond God’s power to redeem.

Calvary gives us the deepest reason for this confidence. The Father did not will the betrayal, injustice and cruelty by which sinful men condemned his Son. Yet in his providence he incorporated Christ’s freely accepted Passion into the mystery of our redemption. Humanity’s greatest crime became the occasion of humanity’s salvation. If God could bring the greatest good from the greatest evil, then nothing in our own lives lies beyond his power to bring into his saving plan.

We will understand the workings of Providence fully only in eternity. For now, we see our lives one day at a time and from a very limited perspective. Events that seem enormously important today may one day appear much less significant, while moments we scarcely noticed may prove to have been occasions of great grace. Faith does not give us an explanation for everything that happens. It gives us confidence in the One who sees what we cannot see.

Our Lady gives us the perfect example of this trust. At the Annunciation, she gave her consent to God without knowing everything that her vocation would involve. She accepted the poverty of Bethlehem, the flight into Egypt and the long hidden years at Nazareth, and eventually she stood beneath the Cross of her Son. She could not always see where God’s providence was leading, but she remained faithful because she trusted him.

We can ask Mary to help us grow in the same confidence. When we understand what God is doing, we can thank him; when we do not understand, we can still place ourselves in his hands. We will continue to make plans, work hard and try to solve the problems that come our way, but we need not imagine that everything depends upon us. We are children of a Father who sees the whole of our life and never ceases to love us. Gradually, omnia in bonum can become more than a phrase we remember when something goes wrong. It can become a conviction that shapes the way we live: “For those who love God, all things work together for good.”

*By the Via Virtutis team
Photo by Alex Noriega on Unsplash