The Healing Journey

June 29, 2025

The following is excerpted from “In His Sandals” by Mother Angelica.

You know, it’s really exciting to watch God work in the present moment. But if you’re not aware of God in that moment, if everything to you is chance and luck, and you do it or your neighbor does it, you’re always at the mercy of something outside your control. And so, you’re like a reed shaken by the wind. And as St. Paul says, you need perfect wisdom, and only God has perfect wisdom. Your wisdom and my wisdom are imperfect.

You know, that’s why you and I don’t understand why things happen to us. Have you ever said, “I don’t understand God’s will. I don’t know why He permits this in my life or permitted this in someone else’s life.”? And we don’t understand it. Maybe five or six years later, maybe twenty years later, you look back on your life and you suddenly find out that something very, very good happened. I learn this every day.

You know, sometimes I begin something, and it just seems to go to pot; it just seems to fall apart. And immediately, the thought comes to my mind: God is at work. And you just watch Him put the pieces together. You have a disappointment in your life. Instead of getting frustrated and antagonistic toward your neighbor and God and feeling guilty, say, “God, You bring good out of it.”

This is hope. Hope is that magnificent virtue that makes you, as a Christian, see good in everything. Now, we don’t understand it, but we know God’s wisdom is with us. I love to look at Jesus in the morning when I get up in faith and say, “Jesus, I know there’ll be a lot of things today that happen to me or to those I love, just ordinary things — a machine breaks down or just a lot of things — and I will not understand it. But I want to give them to You because I see Your perfect wisdom.”

And then you begin suddenly to understand the realities of life. You begin to live in a life that’s both visible and invisible. You begin to see God’s providence.

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