Articles

When times are bad, trust that God will never let them get too bad. Stay close to Jesus, and trust that even now, he is helping you through the storm.

Jesus lays in the boat, because he wants us to believe and trust that he is helping us, and is going to help us. When he was sleeping in the boat with his disciples, the storm seemed so bad that it might drown them. But Jesus was asleep!

How could Jesus sleep through that storm?

Because he is God, and how can a storm destroy God, who created storms, who created everything?

So the lesson we must deeply embed in our hearts is that, wherever Jesus is, it is *safe *there. No storm can overtake it. No problems in life can overcome it.

Which means, our job is to stay near Jesus. Our job is to remain with him.

If we have tried our best to make the bad things in our life stop, but they just don’t seem to stop, then trust that God is not going to let it hurt us very much, and let go of it all, completely entrusting yourself to God.

Sometimes, the fear of bad things, or the worry and anxiety about how to stop them, or even the outright panic in trying to stop them and seeing every effort thwarted, can actually be a lot more harmful to our souls than the bad things we’re trying to stop in the first place!

This must be why St. Padre Pio so often said “pray, hope, and don’t worry.”

God will not fail us. God is here to help us. He has great plans for us, to make us happy. He is not out to destroy us, or to punish us like a vengeful pagan deity. He is our merciful and loving and infinitely-good Father.

Even his punishments are meant for our own good. But not everything bad that happens to us is a punishment, either. Mary was sinless but had to endure many bad things.

The first thing we can do when we are troubled by bad things, is to pray. By this, our hearts reach out to God, calling for help. And he hears our prayers, and always answer them in some way or another that’s always going to be good for us. We must believe this, even when we don’t quite see it just yet.

Another thing we can do is to read holy books. This website is filled with book snippets that are posted daily. At the time of this writing, there’s about 450 of them, mostly 2-5 minutes long. These book snippets are a great way to get a glimpse of the perspective of the Saints, who endured so many bad things very patiently, and had peace through all of it, because they had God with them. And they wanted to share that peace with us. So they wrote. And their writings are very easily accessible on this website.

And a third very helpful thing we can do is to receive Holy Communion as often as we can. This makes Jesus actually come into our hearts and souls. We are physically near to him when we receive him in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. While it’s true God is with us in spirit always, and Jesus is united to us when we’re in a state of grace, it’s most true when we have received Communion.

Prayer and holy reading will work with Holy Communion to help us to envision in our imaginations the very fact and reality that Jesus is with us, even though we can’t see him. We’ll be able to believe that we are next to him in the boat, and that the storms happening in our life is not going to harm us. Because we’re in the safest spot in the universe. Right next to Jesus.