We men often do not know what is good for us; "and what makes the confusion still worse is that we think we do. We have our own plans for our happiness, and too often we look to God merely as one who will help us to realize them. The true state of things is quite the reverse. God has His plans for our happiness, and He is waiting for us to help Him realize them. And let it be clear that we cannot improve on God's plans ". To have the practical certainty of these truths, to live them in daily life, leads to a serene abandonment, even in the face of the hardness of what we do not understand and which causes us pain and worry. Nothing collapses if we are protected by the sense of our divine filiation: for if God clothes a blade of grass that is in the field today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire in the oven, how much more you?
Sometimes it happens to us," says St. Thomas, "what happens to the layman in medicine who sees a doctor prescribing water to one patient and wine to another, as his science suggests to him: not knowing medicine, he thinks that the doctor prescribes these remedies at random. "So it is with regard to God: He, with knowledge of cause and according to his providence, arranges the things that men need: he afflicts some who are perhaps good, and lets others live in prosperity who are bad." We can never forget that God wants us to be happy here, but He wants us to be even happier with Him forever in Heaven.
Holiness consists in the loving fulfillment of God's will, which manifests itself in the duties of each day, in one's own circumstances, counting on the incidents of every normal life and abandoning oneself to God with total trust. But this abandonment has to be active and responsible, using the means that each situation requires: going to the doctor when we are sick, doing all the necessary steps to get that job we need so much and for which we have prayed to God, working hard to get ahead, studying the necessary hours and with depth to pass that difficult subject.... Abandonment to God must be intimately linked to responsibility, which leads us to put the appropriate human remedies, because on many occasions what is disguised with excuses ("bad luck", adverse environment, etc.) is hidden mediocrity, laziness, imprudence for not having foreseen all the possibilities and not having put the precise means that the situation required. A work done conscientiously, with order, finished, sanctified, the same as the constant and sacrificed apostolate, gives its fruits with time. And if these fruits take a long time to arrive, it is a sign that God will give them in ways unsuspected for us and that he wants us to sanctify ourselves in these circumstances.