Trust and Gratitude

By Henri J.M. Nouwen

Choose life, then, so that you are your descendants may live, in the love of Yahweh your God, obeying his voice, holding fast to him; for in this your life consists. --Deuteronomy 30:19-20

A life of faith is a life of gratitude--it means a life in which I am willing to experience my complete dependence upon God and to praise and thank him unceasingly for the gift of being. A truly eucharistic life means always saying thanks to God, always praising God, and always being more surprised by the abundance of God's goodness and love. How can such a life not also be a joyful life? It is the truly converted life in which God has become the center of all. There gratitude is joy and joy is gratitude and everything becomes a surprising sign of God's presence.

Whenever Jesus says to the people he has healed: "Your faith has saved you," he is saying that they have found new life because they have surrendered in complete trust to the love of God revealed in him. Trusting in the unconditional love of God: that is the way to which Jesus calls us. The more firmly we grasp this, the more readily we will be able to perceive why there is so much suspicion, jealousy, bitterness, vindictiveness, hatred, violence, and discord in the world. Jesus himself interprets this by comparing God's love to the light. He says:

. . . though the light has come into the world
people have preferred darkness to light
because their deeds were evil.
And indeed, everybody who does wrong
hates the light and avoids it,
to prevent his actions from being shown up;
but whoever does the truth
comes out into the light,
so that what he is doing
may plainly appear as done in God.

Jesus sees the evil in this world as a lack of trust in God's love. He makes us see that we persistently fall back on ourselves, rely more on ourselves than on God, and are inclined more to the love of self than to love of God. So we remain in the darkness. If we walk in the light, then we are enabled to acknowledge in joy and gratitude that everything good, beautiful, and true comes from God and is offered to us in love.

Our Prayer

O God, you are not far from any of us, since it is in you that we live, and move, and exist.

You, who have overlooked the times of ignorance, let everyone everywhere be told that they must now repent (Acts 17:27-28, 30).

Source: Henri J.M. Nouwen, Show me the way (Crossroad Publishing Company, 1992). Used by permission.