Divine Providence and a New Bishop

 [See "New Bishop of the Diocese of Baker"]

Tomorrow is the big day…we think. We hope.  

It’s the day our new bishop will be named...we think. We hope.

Many have been praying for this. We have our hopes, our wishes, our desires, for the future of our diocese, and for our own individual futures within that spiritual framework.

We might be thrilled with our new bishop.

We might be horribly disappointed.

We might see him as a gift that will save our diocese from the downward trend we’ve found ourselves on for the past year.

We might see him as the straw that breaks our back.

But whatever we see, whoever he is, it is certainly by God’s Divine Providence that he becomes the new bishop of Baker. We have to trust Divine Providence.

So…I am trying to prepare myself for tomorrow.

A friend alerted me to a post by Fr. MacRae at These StoneWalls. It’s a very good post, and I recommend you read the entire thing. There’s an important message for us as we survey our current political landscape, but there’s a bigger picture, too – one that applies to all the little circumstances of our individual lives: it’s about Divine Providence and grace.

Again, I recommend you read it in its entirety, but here’s the crux of it. Fr. MacRae says he’s been wondering “about Divine Providence and the burdens we bear”, and that he has been moved to “ask some important questions – THE most important questions of our age and of our predicament”:

Am I able to trust that God has a plan for me?

Am I willing to risk total cooperation in that plan?

Am I willing to sacrifice in order to cooperate in that plan?

Am I willing to accept that the life I am living is part of a symphony, and I am NOT its conductor, but rather a single instrument?

Am I willing to play that instrument to the very best of my ability to lend itself toward a symphonic score that I may never hear and understand in this life?

These are the questions of faith. Surrender and sacrifice do not mean that we must just surrender to whatever tyranny binds us… Trust in Divine Providence also means trust in the graces we are given to stand up to tyranny. The trust we are called to means that in whatever way we may fail in this, God will send another to stand either at our side or in our place. We are not passive observers in this life, blindly assigning to God – or worse, to the government – the responsibility of fixing everything.

Thanks, Fr. MacRae.

As my friend noted, “these few lines are amazing from a priest who's been in prison falsely accused all these years. If he can say this in his situation, how can I not?”