Cheerful and confident availability

THAT gospel episode where Christ shocked his disciples when he told them that they themselves had to feed the big crowd that followed Christ (cfr. Jn 6,1-15) reminds us that we should just have confidence in the ways of God even if what we are asked to do is considered by us not only as difficult but also impossible. We just have to make ourselves available to his will and designs since in the end he will take care of everything.

Yes, God can test our faith. But that test is meant to strengthen our faith in him some more. What we should rather do is to make ourselves readily available, and doing this in a cheerful and confident way.

This testing of the faith was shown, for example, when Mary and Joseph were very worried when they lost the child Christ who stayed behind after some trip. “Did you not know that I must be concerned with my Father’s things?” the child told Mary who later on pondered on these words in her heart and made her faith even stronger. (cfr. Lk 2,49)

That response of the child Christ to Mary also showed how fully available he was to the will of the Father, something that he must have wanted to inculcate in all of us. We need to learn how to make ourselves fully available to God’s designs for all of us.

Those who were close to Christ, starting with Our Lady, made themselves available to God’s ways. “Let it be done to me according to your word,” said Mary to the Archangel Gabriel who was the messenger of God. (Lk 1,38) We see this total availability also in the case of Joseph who even had to do some drastic and difficult decisions just to follow God’s will.

In the gospel, many times Christ would tell his disciples to tie their waist with a belt to signify that they had to tighten their loose clothing to be ready to travel and to do a lot of things. We should also understand that to be truly available to God’s will and ways, we have to make full use of our God-given talents and powers.

This belt-tightening can also signify that we should free ourselves from certain attachments that would prevent us from fulfilling God’s will. Indeed, we have to make some great effort to practice a certain detachment since we all know that in this life, we often would find ourselves trapped in some worldly concerns that would make us insensitive to the things of God.

In this regard, it would be good to examine ourselves to see where our worldly attachments are. We need to make some working system of how to free ourselves from these attachments. This surely will be quite a challenge because more than our efforts, no matter how significant, we need God’s grace to free us from our improper attachments.

We need to have a certain detachment from persons and things to be able to give our heart entirely to God, and with him, we actually have everything else we need. As St. Teresa of Avila put it graphically, with God we have enough—“solo Dios basta.”

To be a disciple of Christ, we have to give everything of ourselves to him and to the tasks such discipleship entails. This will allow the very power of Christ to work on us. So instead of hindering our apostolic work, that detachment that Christ requires of his disciples would only enhance that apostolic work.