Learning To Trust In The Day, Trusting To Rest Through The Night

For most of us, our days seem never to be our own.

Family demands, work responsibilities, daily obligations and routines of every kind, greedily devour our every minute, constantly ransack our very strength.

Silence, contemplation, and true mental rest have become foreign abstractions. Isolation and alienation seem no longer to be clandestine intruders, but rather comfortable and familiar guests.

Throw in our addiction – our enslavement, really – to social media, vile political discourse, and horrid gossip, and it’s clear that we have constructed a very toxic environment for ourselves and for others. An environment that leaves the soul ill-nourished, ill-equipped, and bloodless.

We are dying because we are have forgotten how to live.

And we have forgotten – or, perhaps, have never learned – to trust in the day that we have been given.

Maybe it’s time to take just one step back to feel the moment, to drink in its essence. And to trust that we have likely been given exactly what we need, right here and right now.

Let Edith Stein (Sister Teresa Benedicta) guide us with her enlightened words on faith and trust:

God is there in these moments of rest and can give us in a single instant exactly what we need.

Then the rest of the day can take its course, under the same effort and strain, perhaps, but in peace.

And when night comes, and you look back over the day and see how fragmentary everything has been, and how much you planned that has gone undone, and all the reasons you have to be embarrassed and ashamed: just take everything exactly as it is, put it in God’s hands and leave it with Him.

Put it in God’s hands and leave it to him.

Not a bad way to get through the day (or the night), that.

And so now, why not take five minutes to watch and truly absorb yourself in our earthly inheritance – that is, nature itself.

Be amazed. Be stunned.

And then, truly,

be at Peace: