Wednesday, June 22

The Divine Hours: Prayers for Summertime (pp. 116-117)

To read today's office, click here.

Our office today weaves in and out with the theme that "the Lord protects the faithful" and so the Refrain is the request "Protect my life and deliver me." Why does the Christian make this request to God? "let me not be put to shame for I have trusted in you."

Much easier said than done. I have one of those minds that works from a small symptom (say, for instance, my lower abdomen aches for some odd reason) to a large conclusion (I am dying of cancer). I have been wrong, as my physician often reminds me, each time. "Stick to theology," he tells me. "Good idea," I tell him, "but I can't help it."

What I need to say though is that I also move from my large conclusion to a fair amount of fretting and worrying, and sometimes even to complaining to God that it would not be fair to my family or that I was not done with the work he had given me or that it would be unfair to take me and not some knucklehead who doesn't even care about God or that ... I could go on. What happens is that I can get pretty worked up, and I can get pretty far down the road before I come to my senses that it is my responsibility to call on the Lord and to trust in the Lord that he will protect me.

Trust, I find, is not something mastered as one masters a commute to school, but instead is something that calls our entire being into action each time it is needed. We don't learn faith so much as we practice faith, and we practice faith whenever we are called upon to trust in God for something. And what I also find is that practicing faith is hard sometimes, in fact often.

But the ground of trusting in God is the sheer goodness of God: God protects the faithful.

So, today, if some worry comes along -- and we are putting our house on the market today and that will bring enough worry of its own, I need to remind myself that God is a Protecting God, and I can trust God with my whole being.