Seeking a Sign
Praying hard and trusting harder
by Marion Fernandez-Cueto
in Faith
on Tuesday, June 08, 2010 6:00 AM
Like many Christians, I often struggle to discern God’s will in my life. Faced with crucial decisions or worrying circumstances, I sometimes find the right relationship between prudence and faith, action and trust, not merely difficult to attain but downright impossible to determine.
To whit: Should I take the plunge on a decision and pray it’s the right one, or stall until prayer makes the right choice clear? When does resignation to God’s will become an excuse for laziness and passivity? At what point does careful planning morph into an anxiety-driven need to control outcomes and usurp God?
Whenever I’m forced to wrestle with these questions, I recall a lesson I learned while house hunting some years ago. My husband and I had been stunned by a quick buyer for our recently advertised condo, and found ourselves with a ludicrously small timeframe for choosing the family’s new home. Our city’s zoning-free sprawl and sinking real estate market offered a dizzying array of good options, but little chance of resale if we made bad purchase.
How, we wondered, would we reach the right decision in a matter of weeks? How, practically, was faith supposed to shape our choice? We began our hasty search while praying for guidance, but the answers weren’t clear.
The Audacity of Asking
Half-way through the process, discouraged by a series of failed professional inspections and bidding wars, I asked God to send us a sign. The right house, I prayed, would have a statue of the Virgin Mary. I admit this with some chagrin: asking for signs can be a legitimate Catholic practice under certain conditions,* but it’s also a risky one, plagued by theological misconceptions and spiritual pitfalls. My own request was rooted less in eagerness to pursue God’s will than impatience to resolve our dilemma. We’d been trying for weeks to reach a decision, and things were starting to feel desperate.
Shortly thereafter, we found a perfect house. It comprised the ideal location, price, layout and condition. Ecstatic, I realized there was only one problem: there was no statue. I looked to no avail—the owner wasn’t even Catholic.
For a day or two, I weighed the compelling logistics against my restless conscience. Was this a test of faith by God, or a test of God by me, I wondered? A dangerous experiment with superstition, or a sidetracked exercise in prayer? And were these even necessary considerations, or simply mental gymnastics?
Seeking Stability
I remembered a passage from the Epistle of St. James, which chastises the believer who asks God for wisdom and then revokes his trust. “When he asks, he must believe and not doubt,” writes James, “because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.”
Tired of such instability, I decided to take the wisest decision we could: buy the house, despite the absent statue, and trust that God was leading us anyway.
The transaction proceeded smoothly, and shortly after signing, I dropped in on the seller, who was busy moving her furniture. A large armchair had been pulled from its spot in front of the picture window, and there, on the ledge, was a dusty statue of the Madonna. It had been there all along.
Coincidence? I think not.
I do believe it was a sign from God—and I marveled at it. But here’s what struck me more: it only came after I had taken action to make the very best choice I could with the information and resources I already had. That sign, if sign it was, did not replace my prudential judgment—it confirmed it. To discover God will, I had to do some common-sense legwork first.
Free Will is From God
I don’t know if God always works this way, but I do know He created us with reason and free will, and that He never circumvents or destroys these cornerstones of human nature when He draws us into His divine life. Grace builds on nature, Catholic tradition affirms, and God loves and respects us too much to take away our capacity—and responsibility—for making free choices. When we abdicate prudence in order to “let God guide,” we negate our dignity and trample one of the prime means of discernment God has given us.
Knowing our frailty and shortsightedness, we are right to beg for His help when facing important decisions, but the decisions themselves must be made by us, using every good tool at our disposal. The final outcome is in His hands, yet God wants to use our own choices and daily experience to reach it. I have always found it telling that Christ did not feed the crowd of 5,000 by simply creating a meal from thin air, but chose instead to multiply a little boy’s small, concrete lunch of loaves and fishes. Although He didn’t need it, Christ desired a human contribution—however pathetically insufficient—in order to work His miracle.
If we want God to guide our steps when making a decision, then, we ought to be stepping (or at least stumbling) somewhere first. And “steps” is really the key word—discernment rarely involves just the one momentous decision: getting married, homeschooling, moving, returning to school, finding a new job ... Focusing only on that final choice can be paralyzing!
Rather, effective discernment entails an ongoing progression of small, simple acts: going on a date, attending an open house, replying to a job posting, asking a friend or priest for advice—and continually taking the results to prayer. We can’t usually foresee the long-term consequences of our big decisions, nor reach them overnight, but we almost always have enough information to take the next small step in front of us.
Learning to Trust
Finally, if we earnestly (and honestly) pray that God’s will be done through our choices, we must trust that it will. Without this trust, our rightful sense of responsibility quickly swells into the prideful illusion of control. Yet He is the one in charge: all of salvation history demonstrates that God has the power to take not only good decisions but faulty—even sinful—ones, and use them for His glory.
As a spiritual director once told me, God is like a brilliant conductor who can transform the disastrous end note of a concert into the start of a magnificent new symphony, far surpassing the original. No matter how badly we goof, God’s providence can make “all things work together for good to them that love Him.” (Romans 8:28)
This is why the Church has the audacity to call Original Sin a “happy fault” (felix culpa) in the Easter Vigil’s Exultet, because it was this very fault that “won for us so great a Redeemer.” Under Christ’s New Covenant, initiated in gratuitous response to the Fall, the Kingdom of God supersedes even the blissful Garden of Eden. As C.S. Lewis once wrote, the worst has already happened—and has been repaired. However critical our personal struggles or the state of the world, what great reason we have for hope!
—Marion Fernandez-Cueto writes from Houston, TX. She was baptized into the Catholic Church in 2000.
*St. Thomas Aquinas addresses this issue in the Summa Theologica under a larger question about tempting God. It’s one thing (and a sin) to demand that God to “prove Himself,” Aquinas says; it’s quite another to ask Him to help you fulfill His will in a given situation: “There are two ways of asking God for a sign: first in order to test God’s power or the truth of His word, and this of its very nature pertains to the temptation of God. Secondly, in order to be instructed as to what is God’s pleasure in some particular matter; and this nowise comes under the head of temptation of God.” Summa Theologica II-II q. 97, a. 2
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