If that hecatomb of the pigs had not taken place, the swineherds would probably not have gone down to the village and its inhabitants would not have known that Jesus was there, so close. If the woman who met the Master in Capernaum had not been so many years ill and wasted her goods on doctors, she would not have perhaps approached the Master to touch the hem of his garment and would never have heard those consoling words of Jesus, the most important of her life, which were well worth all the suffering and useless expenses.... What seems to us to be an evil is perhaps not so bad; sin alone is an absolute evil, and from it - with love, humility and contrition - one can draw the delicious fruit of a new encounter with Christ, in which the soul emerges rejuvenated.
Behind those apparent evils (sickness, tiredness, pain, ruin...) we always find Jesus who smiles at us and gives us a hand to overcome that situation and grow from within. How that leper would give thanks for the terrible evil of his sickness, for it was what led him to Christ! The evils of this life are a continuous call to our heart, which tells us: the Master is here and calls you!9. But if we are more attached to our projects, to our health, to life... than to the will of God - sometimes mysterious and incomprehensible to us at first - we will only see in misfortune the loss of a good that, being relative and partial, perhaps we have made absolute and definitive. What a great mistake if we did not know how to see in those moments Jesus who visits us!
With a logic different from our own, the Lord arranges events so that, sometimes with pain and sometimes with pleasure, we can let go of everything so that He can fill our entire existence. Many times we have to think about the intimate action of God in us, because He arranges even the smallest circumstance so that we can be happy, to facilitate the detachment of ourselves, of our projects..., so that we can be saints. In the eyes of God "a single soul has more value than the whole universe, and the marvels that God works in the secret of our lives are by far more extraordinary than all the splendors of the material cosmos". If these gentiles had understood who was before them, if they had grasped the miracle worked in those two men who were redeemed from the devil, what would the economic misfortune have mattered, if through it they had known Jesus? They would have given thanks for it, they would have invited Jesus and would have organized a good feast because the Master was with them and because they had recovered two of their own men.
If we look with faith at the small or great misfortunes of life, we will always end up giving thanks for them: for that illness, for the humiliation we suffered at the hands of those we least expected, for hunger, for thirst, for the loss of a job? Thank you, Lord," we will say to her in the intimacy of our hearts, "because you have presented yourself, even if it was where we least expected it! Let us ask Our Lady, who knew so much of contradictions, of anxiety and pain, to teach us not to lose these opportunities to meet Jesus in the midst of these most unfavorable human circumstances.