Increasing our trust through prayer
My husband was in Japan three days before I realized how sick he was.
After confirming that he had landed safely in Japan for his work conference, I’d gone about my usual routine with three young children at home at the time.
But then, we had a video call with him, and I could see my husband’s gaunt face and haggard look.
In three days he’d become a ghost of a man, a shadow.
The quick transformation was alarming.
My husband was in Japan three days before I realized how sick he was.
After confirming that he had landed safely in Japan for his work conference, I’d gone about my usual routine with three young children at home at the time.
But then, we had a video call with him, and I could see my husband’s gaunt face and haggard look.
In three days he’d become a ghost of a man, a shadow.
The quick transformation was alarming.
He’d been in Japan just long enough to give his talk at the conference, and then he became terribly ill — possibly from a bad flu or food poisoning — confined to his hotel room for the rest of the week.
Thankfully a coworker brought him the equivalent of Japanese Gatorade, but otherwise he was sick and alone, on the other side of the world.
And there wasn’t a thing I could do to help him.
Trust required
I’d like to say that was a crucial learning moment for me — an “aha” moment in which I realized the necessity of the immeasurable depth of trust required in our relationship with Our Lord.
But at the time I was so crippled by anxiety and worry that I wouldn’t have been able to recognize what trust looked like in any form.
Despite the pitiable state of my spiritual life, however, I’m pretty sure I prayed for him to get well enough to get on the plane to come home — because there was literally nothing else I could do.
We control nothing
How often in our lives are we faced with situations we simply cannot control?
The answer is actually every moment of every day, although we may not think about that very often. It’s the big things that cause us to examine just how deep our trust goes.
Do you trust Our Lord? Truly trust Him? In all things big and small?
Do you trust that He will provide for your needs, seen and unseen, in ways you cannot know or imagine?
Can you surrender to Him each thing that brings you grief, embarrassment, consternation, anger, fear, anxiety, sadness?
Do you pray for Him to give you the grace, to supply the trust you need in all situations?
Birth of humility
When this earthly life drives you to your knees in prayer because there is literally nothing else you can do, that is the birth of the humility needed to take the first step toward true trust in Our Lord. We cannot. But He can.
When we apply this level of trust not only to the situations in our surface lives, but also to our hidden spiritual lives, life’s exterior and interior challenges take on a whole new dimension.
This is how we become little before Him: to see ourselves as we are, as He sees us — completely helpless in saving ourselves from ourselves.
Faced with the shadow of our gaunt inner selves, when we realize there is nothing else we can do to save ourselves, we get on our knees and pray — with conviction, humility, and trust.
It is literally the only — and best — thing we can do.
Julianne Nornberg, mother of four, works at St John School in Waunakee and the Cathedral of St. Bernard of Clairvaux in Madison.
