Lectio
“Since both from envy the little child is pure, and from vainglory, and from longing for the first place; and he is possessed of the greatest of virtues, simplicity, and whatever is artless and lowly. Not courage then only is wanted, nor wisdom, but this virtue also, humility I mean, and simplicity.”
— St. John Chrysostom, Homily 58 on Matthew
Meditatio
Our deepest fear, and the root of all of our sin, is the fear that God is not trustworthy, that He does not love us and that He will not take care of us if we surrender ourselves over to Him. This fear causes us to worry about things we cannot or should not change. It causes us to fret or to grieve over things that have already happened. And it causes us to act out in ways that pull us away from the path that God has laid out for our lives, because this path requires faith, it requires trust, and it requires patience.
More than these, however, God’s path for us requires humility. It requires that we accept the fact that we are not God, that we do not have His vision, and that our plans, when they are in conflict with His, are not in our best interest. In fact, such plans lead only to desolation, despair, and self destruction.
Humility, then, means coming to terms with the truth of who we are and who we are not. It means seeing ourselves as right-sized, as neither magnificent nor insignificant, but as a beloved child of a trustworthy and faithful God whose every thought, action, and desire is for us, not against us.
And so the Lord invites us to be like children. He invites us to be as innocent as a child, to be as trusting as a child, and to be as simple in our desires, our needs, and our aspirations as a child. A child, after all, does not have aspirations to be anything but a child. They do not experience envy, vanity, or resentment like we do. Nor do they desire for status or power or the accumulation of wealth. A child knows only one thing and that is to be cared for.
God desires this simplicity for us. He loves us so much that He wants nothing more than for us to give ourselves over to this love, to abandon our fears, our hopes, and our aspirations and to trust Him. He invites us into the stillness of a sleeping child who knows nothing but trust, nothing but love, and nothing but the comfort of being both utterly vulnerable and completely safe in the arms of the one who loves them. This perfect simplicity is, Jesus tells us, the gateway to the kingdom of heaven. It is God’s loving embrace, received fully, unquestioningly, and unreservedly — the way a child is gathered into its mother’s bosom, wanting for nothing.
Oratio
Before My Wounds
restore my innocence
dear God
return me to
who I once was
trusting
caring
vulnerable
before my wounds
grew so deep
as to expose my heart
to such pain
that it hardened
to love
out of self-preservation
restore my youthful heart
dear God
return me to
who was once loved
Contemplatio
Somewhere beneath what has hardened, the part of you that once knew how to trust is still there, still yours, still His. You don’t have to find it yourself. Stay in the quiet with this, saying yes to whatever He wants to stir in you.
Related Scripture
“But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.”
— Psalm 131:2 (NRSVCE)
For Further Reading
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like Sold Short By a Hundredfold: Abba Nilus and the Wisdom of Wanting What God Wills (Lectio Divina), which meets the same struggle to trust God’s plans over our own from another angle — not the hardened heart softened back into trust, but the grasping heart taught to want what God wills instead of what it thinks it needs.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
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