Even this is for our good.

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• Romans 8:28-30
• Matthew 1:1-16, 18-23

Omnia cooperantur in bonum.
All things work for the good.

This is one place where I feel woefully weak in my faith. For I need to have all my ducks in a row all the time. Yes, it’s true: I could up and move across the country tomorrow. But if I do it’s because I have all my ducks in a row and, “I got this.”  I know I usually make it look like “God, you gotta miracle? Cuz I need one…” but the reality is if I trusted God more, I might have actually stayed put and acted rather than running away.

In hindsight no one would be happy: but I might have stayed in Western North Carolina, when the Parish and the Monastery melted away… and become Roman Catholic just there. B16 had come on board, everything was looking rosy, Asheville was even doing parades with the Blessed Sacrament!  

But I’ll take my ducks and run away… you know though: God even uses that. I had a birthday phone call last week from a friend whose life was always in chaos because she just had one thing she could NOT get at work. After years she got it… and that gave her more responsibility, and that put her life in even more chaos. Thing is she was my housemate. We might have hung on a bit longer if she saw this work opportunity coming. But lo, when it got there, it was even worse than before. My departure – my fear of commitment – turned out to be something God used for my good: in this case, my sanity.

I’ve nearly never come clean about all the times I’ve run away. But mostly: it was because I couldn’t trust God to bring good out of where I was or else, I was too chicken to take the actions I knew I needed to take so running away was the only thing left. For example, when I became Orthodox I was living with this guy. I was trying to find a way to be Orthodox and hold on to this guy. I couldn’t… so I left. Moved to Asheville, because I couldn’t make the break up either. So, when I wrote “I was in hell” I was living with this Dude. And no small art of my hell was made up of not being willing to act and to trust God when I acted.

So I ran away. 

Which God used: bringing dozens of people into my life, bringing friends I’d never have had otherwise, reconnecting me with my parents (because of proximity), reconnecting me with some sense of adult responsibility: I came away from there with my first driver’s license and my first car. And I got there with my first sense of things I can’t do any more and be Orthodox or Catholic. It took a while to sink in, but the lesson was learned.

I’m not sure why this lesson shows up on the Nativity of the BVM, but maybe because her parents were barren for so long that they are a reminder: even when life isn’t going “right” it is still going God’s way.

My formation director in the Dominican Tertiaries encouraged me by saying that God used all the things I’d been through to bring me to holiness. I’ll chew on that. God uses all things for our Good – which means for our acquisition of virtue, our salvation, our union with him. As St Paul says, later in this chapter.

Certus sum enim quia neque mors, neque vita, neque angeli, neque principatus, neque virtutes, neque instantia, neque futura, neque fortitudo, neque altitudo, neque profundum, neque creatura alia poterit nos separare a caritate Dei, quae est in Christo Jesu Domino nostro.

For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Not one thing that can happen to us can part us from God. 

But this is where my faith is weakest, and I have more than trouble here: trusting that things are going not “as God planned” but rather “As God is saving me”.