St. Peter tells us in his first letter, “Cast all your cares on Him (God) because He cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7).
Unfortunately, we’re not always especially adept at noticing God’s care for us.
Some of that comes from God’s usual way of giving us graces — without our being able to feel anything. We may find ourselves suddenly able to see our way clear in a situation and take action that will please God. Or we discover we can make that call we’ve been dreading to our relative, or smile at that person we dislike, or volunteer for something at church that we’ve never done before. And in doing so, we don’t feel anything “cosmic,” and we chalk those rather-cosmic graces up to our own strength or ability.
Even when we do sense a touch of some kind from God, if we are in the middle of an intense task or quest of some kind, we may brush it off and let it go by.
But we can work to raise our awareness of His subtle presence. We can begin by paying attention and pondering those who already pay attention and give witness to God’s blessings.
A friend recently described her apartment home in Chicago to me. She can sit in her room and look out over rooftops to see three Catholic church steeples in the panorama. She knows the Eucharist is there and says her view enhances her prayer. She credits God for placing her there for several decades and for providing her with a landlord who rarely raises her rent so she can continue to afford to live there. She is one who pays attention with gratitude for God’s blessings.
On the other side of the world, OSV News tells of the family of a Kentucky priest. His brother Stephen and his family, refugees in Malaysia, were just days away from flying to the U.S. when the January executive order suspended refugee admissions. In Malaysia, for years the hard-working Stephen had supported his entire Myanmar family, including funding his priest-brother’s university education. Now, in addition to being in what you might call refugee limbo, Stephen has serious health problems from the harsh living and working conditions. “The family,” reports OSV News, “lives near a Catholic chapel and holds on to hope through prayer, despite the uncertainty, with Stephen telling his brother, ‘God never abandons me; if we need anything, He provides.’”
Developing our own heightened sense of gratitude can raise our awareness of God’s presence and His care. That takes effort, but such efforts can become good habits. From displaying upbeat sayings of saints to writing down at least five good things from our day before we go to sleep, we can take deliberate steps to boost our levels of gratitude.
One good habit is to consider that a setback might be preventing us from experiencing a big disaster of some kind. Without knowing exactly why plans don’t work out, that can help us trust that God does care and continues to help us.
If our younger life trained us to have a negative view of things, even once we are in better surroundings as adults, we still may not realize that more-positive views are truer to reality. But always we can try to change. Whether we have lived a long time with negativity or not, we will do better with prayers.
Asking God to help us love Him and be grateful for His many gifts is a very fine prayer. Without dipping into the wearying request for “signs,” we can ask Him for the graces we need to become a more positive person and be more able to see Him at work in our lives and the lives of others.
All of this ties together with the quality/gift/habit of trusting in the Lord. That is not automatic, but again, we can ask God to help us trust Him more and more. Such a request is similar to the biblical dad who told Jesus “I do believe; help my unbelief!” (Mk 9:24). And trust embraces this Jubilee year’s theme: hope.
We can do this with God’s help, and then, even when we don’t feel the graces and gifts He gives, we’ll be able to cast our cares on Him because we’ll know that indeed He cares for us!
