Trust In God

by Fred Vilbig

As I am writing this, Putin is taking over the Crimea. There are mass protests in Venezuela over what socialism has wrought there. Syria is experiencing a Civil War. There are ongoing conflicts in a number of African nations with tens of thousands of deaths in recent years. There was a bombing in a Russian train station and an organized stabbing in a Chinese train station.

In the Church, we have the Vatican Bank scandal which from a distance seems to involve fraud and corruption. We have the “Bishop of Bling” in Germany, and I hear that the name is being applied also to a Bishop in Newark, New Jersey. And then there is the ongoing sex scandal involving priests and primarily young boys (yes, it is primarily homosexual in nature no matter what the New York Times’ editorial board wants you to think).

In the midst of all of this, it is hard sometimes to find God.

 He seems to be silent, distant, even absent. We can get discouraged thinking about the mess we see in the world, and even in the Church. We think as Dickens wrote, we live “in the worst of times.” But if we look at history, we will see that things are really no worse than they have been historically with wars and scandals.

So what are we to do? Trust in God. An old Latin hymn says “Christus Vincet, Christus Regnat, Christus Imperat” which means “Christ wins, Christ reigns, Christ rules.” During difficult, challenging times, I think we are called upon to trust in God even more. For some reason, faith is the primary currency of heaven. Abraham’s faith was credited to him as righteousness according to the book of Genesis. So when things are bad and look their worst, we need to trust in God.

As we go through the season of Lent, I think it is important for us to strengthen our faith. We can do that through prayer (including the sacraments), living our faith, and to sacrifice. As St. James said, faith without works is dead. So we need to act on our faith to make it alive and to make it grow. Prayer, abstinence and fasting, and offering our sufferings to God help our faith to grow.

Because in the end, no matter how dark things may appear, Christ wins. We should never forget that. So trust in God in all things.