The right disposition of heart in order to obtain a response from the Lord… What must we do, in order for the Lord to respond to us? First and foremost, we must be sincere and available.
The word translated as "available" - disponabilità, in Italian - also has the sense of “readiness,” “openness,” “willingness."Often we pray and pray, insistently asking that God’s will be done in us…but what if the Lord indicated to us a road that wasn’t in our plans? And what if the His plan were contrary to what we think we desire? Are we ready to say yes? These are questions which help us reflect upon ourselves and see to what extent we are sincere in our search for the will of God – and, above all, to what extent we are ready to put it into practice.
Along these lines, our Mother General made a short video explaining a little more about what it means to be ready to welcome the Plan of God in our own lives. Here is the transcript in English:
Peace and good, Sr. Veronica. Could you give us a vocational message for the young people who are searching for the will of God?
Certainly! So, the message that I would like to give to the young people who are setting out on the journey to understand what God wants from them, is to not be afraid of the response that they might receive. At the beginning, especially, it could happen that when one starts praying to understand the will of God, one is afraid that the response might not coincide with one’s own desires and plans…but this might actually slow down our journey of discernment.
I remember that one day during a mission a girl who was praying to understand the will of God told me that she hadn’t received responses. She said, I’m praying and praying but I see that the Lord is not responding to me. And I can’t give my “yes” unless I understand what He wants. So I told her, yes, it’s true that to give our “yes” to the will of God we need to have a good understanding what He is asking of us. But you should also understand that the maturation of the “yes” starts before that: first of all you have to mature your “yes” to what the Lord might ask of you, whatever it might be. Because if, for example, we pray and we say, “Lord, what do you want from me?,” but within ourselves we think, “but if the Lord were to ask this of me, hmm, no. If the Lord were to tell me to go there, I wouldn’t want to do that. If the Lord said, do this other thing, I would be a little bit afraid, I wouldn’t want to do it.” So it’s as if we close off, a little bit, the area that the Lord can work in; as if we were saying, “ok, You can ask me whatever you want, but only within this little space that I am granting to You.” As a consequence, if the plan of the Lord should happen to go beyond our plans, our fears, our human expectations, obviously the Lord’s response might be a little bit delayed, because first we have to mature in ourselves the openness and the availability towards the Lord to do what He asks of us, whatever it may be, knowing that the Lord can never ask of us something that would make us unhappy – because after all He’s the one who created us and He knows better than we do what will bring us to perfect fulfillment.
And so I conclude with a phrase of St. Augustine who says that the best servant of the Lord is not the one who wants to hear from the Lord what he himself desires, but the one who desires [to do] what the Lord tells him. So we ask the Lord for the grace to truly open our hearts to the “yes,” to mature this “yes” like Mary, in such a way that when our “annunciation” comes, we will be ready to give our assent quickly and with firm decision. Amen.
If you would like to see the original video in Italian, you can click HERE.