As happens to so many today, many people have their own plans to be happy, and all too often they look at God simply as someone who will help them carry them out. “The true state of affairs is completely the opposite. God has His plans for our happiness, and He is waiting for us to help Him realize them. And let it be very clear that we cannot improve upon God's plans”4.
Some Christians, because they are excessively attached to their own ideas and whims, tell Jesus to withdraw from their lives precisely when He was closest and when they needed Him most: when illness arrives, or contradiction... when material goods have been lost that it was probably necessary to lose in order to receive the Supreme Good, who arrives, on many occasions, by paths different from those they desired. Perhaps they expected Him in triumph, and He appears in ruin or failure; not the failure produced by laziness, by not having put in the effort or the necessary study—which must lead in any case to an act of contrition and to starting anew with a firm purpose—but the failure that comes when, to our understanding, all human and supernatural means had been deployed to stay afloat. He sometimes arrives by different paths than those through which we were expecting Him. How often God's logic does not coincide with human logic! It is the time to embrace His holy will: “Do You want it, Lord?... I want it too!”5. How many times, in the face of unexpected contradiction, have we made this prayer our own, repeated in a thousand different ways!
It has been said that “God's plan is of a single piece.” Perhaps the conversion of those Gentiles would have begun with the loss of those pigs, through the detachment that this implied; perhaps they would have been the first Gentiles to receive Baptism after the dispersion brought about by the first persecution in Judea. At the end of life, sometimes much sooner, we will see how those pieces fit together that seemed loose and meaningless: all things work together for the good of those who love God
To discover the Lord's will in all the events of life, even in the less pleasant ones, in those that have caused us harm and trouble, to follow Christ closely in every circumstance, “we must be seriously detached from ourselves: from the gifts of intelligence, from health, from honor, from noble ambitions, from triumphs, from successes.
”I am also referring (...) to those clean illusions, with which we seek exclusively to give all the glory to God and to praise Him, adjusting our will to this clear and precise norm: Lord, I want this or that only if it pleases You, because if not, why should it interest me? In this way, we deal a mortal blow to selfishness and vanity, which slither through every conscience; at the same time, we achieve true peace in our souls, with a detachment that ends in the possession of God, ever more intimate and more intense”7.
It is necessary to purify the heart from disordered loves (frequently the disordered love of oneself, excessive attachment to the possessions one has or wishes to have, to one's own ideas and opinions, to the projects one has made for their own happiness...) in order to trust more in our Father God. Then we will be able to see clearly and interpret events correctly, always discovering Jesus within them.
**HCD**