Escape

“This is the key to open the door and enter the Kingdom of Heaven: he who does the will of my Father... he shall enter!” (Saint Josemaria, in “The Way” at 754).

The Crucifixion (Fra Angelico)

I spend so much of my life trying to escape the Holy Will of God.

God allows a trial into my life, and I immediately try to wriggle out of it.  The suffering that He allows for me is suffering that I consider too difficult to bear.  I negotiate and squirm in each of my feelings, trying desperately to try to get out of whatever it is that God has planned for me.  And despite all my best efforts, I seem to only wriggle further into trouble.

The other day, I was confronted by a big problem.  It was so big that I could not manage to see my way past the problem itself.  All I could see was that there was no escape for me.  I considered it logically from every angle.  Then, when that did not serve me with a solution, I considered it illogically from every other angle.  And the more I tried to escape the problem, the more terrified and emotional I became.

Now, the problem did not actually go away.  There was no fairytale ending really – I still have to deal with the issue and it is certainly bigger than I ma and I certainly do not have a way to solve the problem or work my way out of it.

But what did happen, was that I eventually gave up.

This is not to say that I stopped trying to do the right thing, or that I stopped trying to do my very best with the problem that I was confronted with.  It is to say that I stopped trying to run away from that problem altogether.  I stopped trying to leave the situation and escape my fate – so to speak.

And I have been thinking about that today.  Saint Josemaria wrote in “The Way” at 754, “This is the key to open the door and enter the Kingdom of Heaven: he who does the will of my Father... he shall enter!”

And I have been thinking about that.  For while it is true that God does not want us to suffer needlessly, He is determined that we should suffer needfully – as HE HIMSELF SUFFERS for love of us.

And what this really means is that there is a fairytale ending after all.  There is a way to get what I am needing and have a happy ending – it just may not be in this lifetime.

If I consider myself a block of stone, it is my job to allow the Immortal Stonecutter – who is God – to chip away at me and reveal my true beauty.  And there is a great feeling of peace in knowing that God can make of me what He wishes and will use what He allows in my life – through GRACE – to mould me into the soul that He is determined I should be…

For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.