It seem like bedtime is the perfect time for children to come up with pressing and dire concerns or questions that simply cannot wait until morning. The other day after the lights were out upstairs and my husband and I thought we were officially in kid-free zone, a child appeared at the bottom of the stairs to request a trampoline for her birthday, promising that she would use it every single day if we could just buy her one. This request was met only with the infamous parental finger pointing up to the room where she could go and dream about a trampoline.
The other night, however, one of my daughters came to me after bedtime with a much different problem. Deeply distraught, she gave a painful cry to her mother's heart: "Prayer isn't working."
As I prodded her a bit, asking what brought on this despair, she confided that she had been asking God to help her get rid of some fault, but she is still failing and falling all the time. She wants to be good, she wants to be better at loving others, but she isn't getting better. God isn't answering her prayer.
"Amen, sister," I thought, "that's the universal experience of trying to be a better person, isn't it?"
I consoled her that her apparent faults are not a sign that she is failing God. God seems to like to perfect our humility before He perfects our other virtues. If it is always easy to be good or kind or generous or gentle, we may think that the power to do these things comes from us. Luckily, God can even use our falls to bring us higher and closer to Him... so long as we choose humility as our response, rather than despair. If we are perfect in every other virtue but full of pride, all is lost. The reverse however, is not true! Even if we fail in every virtue except for trust and humility, God can still work with us, because our hearts are His.
The great secret to humility is that this "little" virtue can do more to defeat the devil than any other act. The primordial sin really is: "I can do it without you, God." If you can rid your heart of that lie, you've done quite a lot.
It is a fact: we're going to fall. We're going to sin. Sometimes it is on purpose, and sometimes it is an accident. But we should take heart: God isn't surprised. It is not always easy to follow the voice of the Good Shepherd. He knows what we are made of and He has told us how He responds to the sheep who says, "I will not follow." (Luke 15:1-7). He does not leave us, but draws closer and brings us home on His shoulders.
In his amazing book, Searching for and Maintaining Peace, Fr. Jacques Phillipe teaches that humility is like a springboard, a trampoline. It makes even our falls a benefit to us, because with it we can rebound to an even higher level.
The knowledge that God loves me even when I fall doesn't make me a more brazen sinner, it makes me a better jumper, and getting up from our falls more quickly is what gives us the strength and power to acquire all of the other virtues besides. I am the servant of a God who is greater than I can even imagine, because He loves me even when I find it hard to love myself.
This great trampoline is our original birthday gift. Let's use it. Every day.
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