“Do not be afraid,” Jesus tells us in today's gospel (Matthew 10: 26-33). “You are worth more than many sparrows.” If God cares for a single, simple bird, how much more does he care for us? Even the hairs on our heads are counted. This trust in God's loving care is the perfect response to fear, no matter what form fear may take in our lives.
Julian of Norwich, an English solitary who lived in the late fourteenth century, wrote these wise words on trust in God:
During our lifetime here we have in us a marvellous mixture of both wellbeing
and woe. We have in us our risen Lord Jesus Christ, and we have in us
the wretchedness and the harm of Adam’s falling. Dying, we are constantly
protected by Christ, and by the touching of his grace we are raised to true trust
in salvation. And we are so afflicted in our feelings by Adam’s falling in various
ways, by sin and by different pains, and in this we are made dark and so blind
that we can scarcely accept any comfort. But in our intention we wait for God,
and trust faithfully to have mercy and grace; and this is his own working in us,
and in his goodness he opens the eye of our understanding, by which we have sight, sometimes more and sometimes less, according to the ability God gives
us to receive....
And even so, when this sweetness is hidden, we fall again into blindness, and
so in various ways into woe and tribulation. But then this is our comfort: that
we know in our faith that by the power of Christ who is our protector we
never assent to [spiritual and bodily sin], but we complain about it, and
endure in pain and in woe, praying until the time that he shows himself again
to us. And so we remain in this mixture all the days of our life; but he wants us
to trust that he is constantly with us in three ways. He is with us in heaven,
true man in his own person, drawing us up. And he is with us on earth,
leading us. And he is with us in our soul, endlessly dwelling, ruling and
guarding.
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