May 8, 2023
“Let those who suffer according to God’s will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good.” – 1 Peter 4:19
Heather Krauss ’10 Feliciano
Commercial Insurance Underwriter
In the movie August: Osage County, Julia Roberts’ character laments, “Thank God we can’t see the future. We’d never get out of bed.” Most of us have felt that way at one time or another, or maybe we do right now or will sometime down the road. Life is full of hardship, tragedy, and loss, and when we are faced with it, we must decide: Do we doubt and despair, or do we cling harder to the cloak of Jesus and declare our trust in Him no matter what?
It would be easy to choose the latter if the Lord sat down to the negotiation table and laid out His side of the bargain: “If you trust me, I’ll bring you through it in this amount of time, I’ll provide this to comfort you, and in the end you’ll understand why it had to happen this way.” This may seem laughable, but in a way the Lord does lay this out for us, just maybe not in the terms we would like.
“If you trust me, I’ll bring you through this life into the next, I’ll provide my presence to comfort you in the meantime, and in the end you will behold my glory and understand that my ways are higher than yours.”
It becomes easier to trust God in tragedy when we detach our sense of safety and security from this temporal world and place it in the realms of eternity. “Dust thou art to dust returnest was not spoken of the soul,” writes Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Our bodies will break, age, and someday die, but our souls will live forever with Him, and we need not wait for heaven to experience the rest and peace that comes from entrusting them to Him.