When dealing with the impossible

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

 

THAT gospel episode where Christ multiplied five loaves of bread and two fish to feed at least five thousand men (cfr. Mt 13,14-21) eloquently shows us how God really takes care of our needs, even the impossible-to-meet ones. We have no reason to worry at all.

All we have to do is to go to him, ask for help, do whatever we can, and abandon ourselves in his powerful providence. He knows what to do at any moment and it will always be for the best. He usually may ask us to do something about the situation, but that something is really nothing compared to what he would do.

And so, we have no reason to worry really. Let us not allow ourselves to be overtaken by fears and doubts. Rather, let’s just be sport and game about it, and like a line from an old song, we can say to ourselves: “The difficult I’ll do right now. The impossible will take a little while…”

Of course, this faith-inspired attitude would not exempt us altogether from suffering and even from defeats and failures. We will have some of them, just like in any sport. But with God, all these suffering and failures will somehow work out for our own good. We may not know how that would work. We are not expected to know all the mechanisms involved, so to speak. We should just trust.

Neither should we underestimate the part that belongs to us to play out. That God will take care of everything does not mean that we have nothing or little to do in solving our problems. We should not ask God for miracles when we ourselves with our natural powers can handle the situation.

Rather, the proper attitude to have is that we resolve all our challenges as if everything depends on us, knowing that in the end everything also depends on God in the first place.

It’s like a 100%-100% proposition in the sense that everything depends on God, but also everything depends on us. It’s not an 80-20 affair, nor 90-10. It’s 100-100!

This is, of course, a proposition that goes beyond mathematical laws, since we are not dealing here with merely quantifiable elements as much as with spiritual realities, ruled mainly by faith, hope and charity. In this latter system, the law that is followed is the all-or-nothing rule.

This means that the 100% we are supposed to give is not a 100% exclusive of God’s 100%. Rather, it is a 100% that reflects and channels God’s 100%. It’s a 100% that is homogeneous, not heterogeneous, to the 100% of God.

In short, this 100%-!00% proposition we are talking about expresses in some way our total identification with God through Christ in the Holy Spirit.

Said from another angle, we can say that every time we try to do all we can to resolve our temporal affairs, we are approximating our total identification with Christ who also went all the way to redeem us by offering his life on the cross.

What we can gather here is that everything we find ourselves in some impossible situations, we are actually given a golden occasion to identify ourselves with Christ in a more complete way. That is how we have to look at this kind of situation. We are given a privilege, not a burden.

And like Christ who, despite performing wonderful miracles, suffered death on the cross in the end, we should also expect that some passion and death will also take place in our life. But it will be a participation of Christ’s passion and death, a passion and death that can only have a salvific meaning and effect.

It’s important that we get a good overview of our relation with God when we have to deal with the impossible, so we won’t be thrown into unnecessary confusion, fears and doubts, and God forbid, loss of faith!

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com