Faith Helps Us Through Difficult Times
When faith diminishes, difficulties seem greater: Living faith depends on my ability to respond to God, who calls me and wants to treat me as a friend, as One who is the great witness of my life. So if I respond to him and love him, and if he is someone familiar in my life, if I live close to him, I am safeguarding my faith, because my faith is founded on God. . . On the other hand, if I keep my distance from God, if I forget him, if I keep him outside my life and am submerged in merely human and material things, if I let myself be carried away by what is immediately in front of me and God fades from my soul, then how will I have a living faith? If I don't speak with Christ, what is there left of my faith? That is why, in the final analysis, all obstacles to a life of faith may be reduced ⎼ in their root ⎼ to a withdrawal, a separation from God: we cease to deal with him face to face. Then it is that temptations and obstacles gain strength. Peter would have remained firm on the waters and would have reached the Lord if he had not separated his confident gaze from the Lord. All the tempests put together, those within the soul and those arising from outside, cannot shake us as long as we have firm recourse to prayer. To abandon prayer, to pray with little intimacy or sincerity, exposes us to sink into discouragement, pessimism and temptation.
Our faith should never falter even when the difficulties are enormous, even though they seem to crush us under their weight. What does it matter if the whole world with all its power is against you? You. .. go forward!
Repeat the words of the psalm: 'The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? . . . Si consistant adversum me castra, non time bit cor meum' Though my enemies surround me, my heart shall not waver.
from In Conversation with God ⎼ Daily Meditations Volume 4 pp. 305-306