Fear is Useless; What s needed is Trust!

Fear is Useless; What is needed is Trust!

Words the Lord spoke to me when a daughter was in a serious condition while away on vacation.  When my wife told me she needed prayer I bowed my head and closed my eyes.  No sooner had I begun to pray that I had a vision of a woman lying on a gurney with a man all in white with his back to me touching her stomach and fluid coming out of her.  That’s when Jesus said those words.  After the family came back to Pittsburgh and she went to a Pittsburgh hospital the diagnosis was no sign of the malady that was found in the hospital in N.J.

It is just what my daughter needed when she was diagnosed with cancer in one breast.  She just finished 20 sessions of Radiation with another sign of enlarged Lymph nodes in her abdomen and an alert about something in her right kidney that got the attention of the Radiologist who was concerned about it.  The fact is the words of Jesus with my other daughter rang loud and clear.  We can’t regulate the chances of cancer or any other condition that may have devastating effects on ourselves or those close to us.  I remember when my Urinary doctor told me I had cancer that the news to my wife and daughter were threatening.  However, I have been cancer free for 31 years without chemo or radiation.  I learned that Trust in God is essential for all of us.

There are many  passions.  The most fundamental passion is love, aroused by the attraction of the good.  Love causes a desire for the absent good and the hope of obtaining it; this movement finds completion in the pleasure and joy of the good possessed.  The apprehension of evil causes hatred, aversion, and fear of the impending evil; this movement ends in sadness at some present evil, or in the anger that resists it.  (CCC 1765).

In the Christian life, the Holy Spirit himself accomplishes his work by mobilizing the whole being, with all its sorrows, fears and sadness, as is visible in the Lord’s agony and passion.  In Christ human feelings are able to reach their consummation in charity and divine beatitude.  (CCC 1769).

How easy it is to live without fear as long as everything around us goes according to the best days without passions that tend to upset our normal expectations.  

In themselves passions are neither good nor evil.  They are morally qualified only to the extent that they effectively engage reason and will.  Passions are said to be voluntary, “either because they are commanded by the will or because the will does not place obstacles in their way.  (St. Thomas Aquinas).  It belongs to the perfection of the moral or human good that the passions be governed by reason.  (CCC 1767).

Looking back at our fears we must hold fast to what our passions are telling us and Trust totally in Christ.

Ralph B. Hathaway