Many years ago, a young man of about my age told me that he worried he’d missed the wife God had planned for him. He’d prayed for a mate, and not just a mate but the perfect mate, the mate made for him, and he knew God answers prayer.
But, he worried, what if he hadn’t been listening when God answered? What if she’d walked into his life and he didn’t realize it and let her walk out? Or didn’t recognize her because she had a funny haircut or an annoying laugh? What if he met someone he thought was God’s mate for him and married her, but she wasn’t?
He felt fear close to panic. What if he let down the one God had planned for him? What would she do without him? What would he do without her? They wouldn’t have the life God wanted for them. They’d both endure a less-than-ideal marriage.
Tied in knots
The poor man had tied himself in knots with worry. I was a Protestant, but I had not grown up with that kind of evangelical piety. I thought the idea was crazy but managed not to say, “Are you nuts?”
I knew we didn’t get a wife or husband by a kind of divine same-day delivery, with satisfaction guaranteed, which is what I think he expected. He seemed to assume God’s Perfect Match would bring him a wife with the same heart and mind as he, and make marriage easy.
I said something about God not planning our lives that way, at least not often, instead expecting us to make wise decisions — and then, by being faithful to our decisions even if they proved unwise, making life work out as well as we could. We found a spouse, with whom we shared something but not everything, and with her made the marriage work.
I still meet people, including Catholics, who have the young man’s idea that God is moving the world around in a game of infinite-dimension chess to give them particular things they need or want. Many other people expect more miracles than they’re getting.
In my years among the evangelicals (working at a seminary), I saw a lot of people make horrible decisions by assuming God had given them what they wanted, and I saw others treat people horribly for the same reason. Discovering Catholicism, with its “just do it” ethos, was a relief.
How God works
My friend and his peers are like someone who, having watched a highlight film of an NFL season, assumes that someone should make an amazing catch or run or tackle or interception on every play. He thinks the team fails when it gets 4 yards on a simple run up the middle rather than getting 50 yards on a diving toe-tap catch in the end zone.
This person doesn’t get football. He leaves out all the training, study and practice that go into playing. He misunderstands the nature of the game, in which a team wins or loses based on how hard they work to get better and how well they grind it out.
The great plays usually result from a lot of grinding. The days in the weight room, on the practice field and in the film room — and, in the game itself, the 4-yard runs up the middle — make the toe-tap catch possible.
The Catholic understanding holds that God expects us to make most or all of our big decisions, using all the tools he’s given us for discernment, particularly prayer and the sacraments, not least confession, and the words of Scripture and the Church’s teaching — which are, though we tend to forget this, themselves miracles — but also including self-discipline, self-knowledge and common sense, the wisdom of those who know better than we do, and the insight of others who know and care for us.
Having made those decisions, we make them work using the same tools. We get better at life the longer we work at it in the faithful use of what God has given us.
God with us
God occasionally steps in, but on his terms and for his reasons. We should take obvious interventions as blessings and not presume we’ll get them when we want them. God sprung St. Paul from prison but he didn’t heal him of his thorn in the flesh.
The Catholic life is a getting-better-at-it, grinding-it-out life, with occasional and unpredictable highlights when God helps us in a more dramatic way than usual. The secret is that in working through life with God’s help, as painful as it can be, we can experience deep joy, even if he never arranges our life for us.
And if we want to experience a great, dramatic miraculous intervention in our lives, we can always go to Mass.
