The great British statesman, Winston S. Churchill, once said: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” The latter aphorism helped me understand the wisdom of standing on God’s ground amid life’s hardships and wait for his saving

intervention.

The seventeenth century English poet, preacher and a leading representative of the metaphysical poets, John Donne, wrote: “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main”.

I staunchly clung to this belief until I found myself in a situation where human support temporarily evaporated. My life’s vision become so blurred that I was constrained to sit down and have a long emotional chat with God.

And what a chat I had with God my friends? In his presence I was free enough to express all my anger, frustration and grief at life’s blatant unfairness. I almost told God that if He was omnipotent why could he not rescue his reputation as a faithful God and save himself from ridicule by coming to my aid? Looking at the experience retrospectively, what good would have emerged if God acted the way I wanted him to act? Had he assented to my wishes could he live up to his self-revealed claim, as prophesied by Isaiah: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isa 55, 8-9)?

In front of God’s ineffable ways my only response was to cling to his promises through perseverance. The Letter to the Hebrews greatly encouraged me in my faith journey: “For you have need of endurance, so that you may do the will of God and receive what is promised” (Heb 10, 36). Later on I started realizing that God was after something when I felt myself helpless to continue believing in him. As the great sixth century hermit, St Dorotheos of Gaza, wisely put it: “The grace of God comes swiftly to the soul when endurance is no longer possible”.

With the Apostle Peter, I experienced something descending from heaven, like a great sheet, let down by four corners upon the earth in which two things stood clear to me (see Acts 10, 11). The injunction was direct: First, talk about God’s faithful presence in your loneliness through internet. Second, write how much the Lord has done for you (see Luke 8, 39).

In revisiting this experience I would gladly subscribe to what St Makarios of Egypt said: “In afflictions and sufferings, endurance and faith, are concealed the promised glory and the recovery of celestial blessings”. In my story both the promised glory as well as the celestial blessings were translated into my double mission of proclaiming God’s faithful aid in life’s adversities via online and journalistic vehicles. Thus, God’s consequent answer to my pleas was all the more original, curative and salvific!

Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap