Always hope in God

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

NO matter what happens, we should always continue hoping in God, since God never fails. His love for us remains constant in spite of our infidelities, failures and sins. In fact, it is in these predicaments that his love for us gets even more desirous as dramatized in the parables of the lost coin, lost sheep and the prodigal son.

Yes, there’s always hope even in our worst condition. If Christ can resurrect the dead, the worst condition that we can find ourselves in, what else can he not do to save us?

Even if we are rotten to the core in terms of our speech and behavior, there is always hope. And so, we just have to be patient which does not mean that we do nothing. We have a lot to do, because God’s grace and mercy would have no effect if we are not receptive to them by at least making an effort to correspond to his will.

We need to foster this hope as we go through the rapidly changing circumstances brought about by all sorts of developments, personal, social, political, economic, technological, etcetera. We need to foster this hope as we face new things that can be mysterious to us, especially at the beginning.

Our hope should be properly based. We cannot simply root them out by our human powers alone and the many other resources provided by nature. They are never enough to tackle with what we have to tackle, since we have to contend not only with material and natural goals and challenges, but also spiritual and supernatural ones.

A hope based on God surely delivers, though it can have God’s ways of delivering that are mysterious and therefore puzzling and disturbing to us. Just the same, we just have to learn to flow with God’s ways.

Thus, a certain amount of detachment and abandonment is needed here. We cannot be sure of everything. But with that hope based on God, even in our mistakes and failures, we would be brought to where we should be, and that is, with him and our eternal destination, beyond whatever mundane and temporal fate we may have here.

Remember St. Paul’s words: “All things work together for the good for those who love God.” (Rom 8,28) Of course, loving God presumes hope, for without hope we cannot love God truly.

And so, let’s not be unduly entangled with earthly things. Yes, it’s true that we have to be immersed in our temporal affairs, for after all, they are also the means and occasions that would somehow determine our eternal destiny. But they themselves are not what would bring about our eternal destiny. It’s God’s grace whose mysterious ways we just have to learn to correspond as best that we can.

Our correspondence to God’s grace may have all sorts of defects and imperfections, but as long as it’s done with good faith, with our best efforts that can always be better, with eagerness to say sorry and to make up when we commit mistakes, I suppose God, being a very good father to all of us, will understand and pick us up where we fall or where we are found wanting.

There’s no point belaboring our failures and defects. God’s mercy will take care of everything as long as we at least are open to God’s mercy. We need to work on our conviction that we are children of God so that we do not fall into unnecessary fears and doubts as to how our earthly affairs and our life itself would go. Fail or succeed, they will always be for the good.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com