God is precisely present when we are injured

Book 2, Chapter 1 
-Part 4-

As a believer’s faith strengthens, that very faith becomes more and more intuitive.

Caussade uses an interesting word – “instinct” – to describe the person “that sees only the divine life” everywhere in everything. To recognize God’s intentional presence in “labors and mortal dangers,” as he says, allows the faithful person to respond to these situations as to God himself.

Work becomes an aspect of my life with God. So, too, do distressing circumstances that sometimes threaten what is considered a meaningful life. An injury or illness that severely limits one’s abilities or movements – or even confines one to a single room, or a bed, or a wheelchair, or demands continual connection to medical machinery – here God precisely is, exerting his will and accomplishing his work.

As well, he is exactly present when it is not our bodies that fail us, but life. A lost relationship, a broken promise, a betrayal, a job, an education, a missed opportunity, the death of someone beloved – there are thousands of ways that the likes of these can injure us to the depths of our souls; the anguish of which returns often or remains indefinitely. Here, too, God precisely is.

This is impossible to see without faith – and not just faith, but an instinctive, intuitive faith. The Bible may or may not give us a helpful verse at the moment, but a life lived in the presence of God may not require words to know that God has named us “the beloved,” and that He does not stop caring, nor does he love in stops and starts.

Even in our most injurious, devastating times – when we seem to ourselves to be nothing more than the sum total of our weaknesses and failures, or when tragedy strikes with a devastating force – in the recesses of our profound sadness, God precisely abides. The sufferer does not need to articulate the meaning of his suffering. We, I think, waste much effort here. The sufferer need only articulate faith in God and accumulate His love.

“There must be a reason for this,” we might declare. But the reason, like so many things, is hidden in God. So, why set out on an empty exploration seeking the reason for our plight, when we can instead seek all the further our God and what we can know of him?