Trustworthy in Small Matters

Our good Jesus has placed my soul in extreme desolation and I find it difficult to think that I am living the life of God's children.  I am in a wilderness where my soul knows no comfort in these moments of trepidation and hope.

Now and again a most feeble light penetrates from above, just enough to reassure my poor soul that all is being directed by divine Providence and that through joy and tears the heavenly Father is leading me by inscrutable secret ways to the end he has in view.  This is nothing else than the perfection of my soul and its union with God.  But then, alas, a little later my poor soul is plunged into a more tragic desolation than before.

I cannot understand how one can live when our blessed God places the soul in such straits.  All I can say is that my soul in this state seems to glimpse a concealed hand which can be none other than the hand of God.  Moreover, at the apex of my spirit I feel, like the stirring of a gentle spring breeze, the divine Master's most beautiful assurance that not a hair of our heads will perish without the permission of our heavenly Father, that he watches over the soul with fatherly love, and that when he tries it by similar desolation he invariably does so out of love and for the soul's perfection.

Hence it is that the bitterness of the trial is sweetened by the balm of God's goodness and mercy.  Praise be to God who can so marvelously alternate joy and tears so as to lead the soul by unknown paths to the attainment of perfection, a flower which the merciful God causes to bloom amid the thorns of suffering, watered by the tears of the soul that suffers patiently, that humbly conforms to the divine will and prays with warmth and fervor.

Let us always trust in God, and may our lively faith and the comfort of Christian hope assist us in this.

Saint Pio of Pietrelcina

-Saint Pio of Pietrelcina (1968) was an Italian Capuchin priest who during his lifetime enjoyed a vast reputation for sanctity.