“Thy Will Be Done.”
Those four simple words from the Our Father are so easy to rush through, so quick to blend together as if they are one word, in a prayer we’ve been reciting since we were old enough to speak. But these four words really are a prayer in themselves, a prayer of surrender. We are asking God for His will to be done, God who is all-powerful and the great orchestrator of all things, who works all things out for our good (Romans 8:28). In asking that His will be done we are voicing our surrender to His will, which will always be done. We are surrendering to His perfect plan.
January 12th of this year, I had the blessing of visiting St. Elizabeth Ann Seton’s shrine in Emmitsburg, Maryland. I learned about a saint I’d known of all my life, but whose bravery had never occurred to me before. She was a woman whose faith was strong enough to stand bravely alone when she was the odd one out among all her family and friends, and a woman whose faith took her on a dangerous journey across the Atlantic to the United States, where God would work through her immeasurably more than she could have imagined (Ephesians 3:20). St. Elizabeth Ann Seton established a school for children of impoverished families, which became the Sisters of Charity who ran schools and orphanages across the country, and who still make a difference in so many lives today.
On January 12th of 2019, I learned all about this great and faithful woman and thought how small my faith is in comparison — and then I walked through the entrance to her church, but was drawn to this little room off to the side, before I even looked into the beautiful main part of the church. And this is what God wanted me to see. This is Jesus taking His cup, surrendering to God’s plan for His life. In Matthew 26:39 He says “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but Yours be done.” Jesus was human, and He was scared. He was about to experience the most painful suffering and death, and He knew that it was for the good of the world. But He was still scared, and so He asked that this suffering not come to pass. He cried and He sweat blood and He experienced all of the stress and anxiety and pain and grief and fear and anger and guilt and suffering that any of us has ever experienced, He felt it all. And He cried out to God to take the cup from Him. But then He said, “Nevertheless, Thy will be done.” This “Nevertheless” is what saved us all. This surrender is what God asks us to emulate, because in some small way God can work through our surrender just as He worked through Jesus, for the good of the world.
At the beginning of this year, I thought God was teaching me this lesson so that I could apply it to my past. I’d been hurt by people in a way that caused me years of pain, and I had long given up asking God why He would let that happen to me. To look at Jesus taking His cup of suffering, knowing God had an infinitely bigger plan that would come out of it, taught me that God had a plan to use my suffering for good too. I finally learned that God has a plan to use my painful experiences to help others, and that did help me heal from my past. I could see God’s grace in the past.
But God didn’t just intend this lesson to heal me from my past, but also to help me deal with my present. I could not have imagined how many times I would call to mind this statue over the next year, in tears and in pain once again. January feels like a lifetime ago, but 2019 has flown by in a blink at the same time. And it’s always pointed back to this lesson. My mom passed away this year and I could never describe the weight of losing her, except that it’s made me feel incredibly lost. And simultaneously I started a new job, my first real job, which is a struggle to say the least. These two life changes have caused me to ask God once again, why? Many times over. And the hardships of this year have been a kind of suffering I would have never expected. But the grace God has provided during this season is also beyond what I would have expected, and the fruit that God will bring through these hardships, I know is more than I can imagine. I know this to be true, because I’ve seen it in my life in the past, and I’ve seen it in Jesus’ life in the scriptures. God will once again use my suffering for good, as I’m already seeing signs that I’m exactly where He needs me to be, and signs of what He has planned for me next. And so for the present, the past, and the future, on my best days, and on my worst days, I will say “Nevertheless, Thy will be done.”
I also know that this lesson was meant for this year, because my mom had a special devotion to St. Elizabeth Ann Seton. Since she was a teacher at a Catholic elementary school for many years of her life, she often prayed to St. Elizabeth Ann Seton to bless her teaching ability and to bless her students, and my mom had a faith just as strong. She was still alive in January, but I know that through God’s grace and His divine plan I was brought there to learn about one of my mom’s favorite saints and to learn a lesson that would carry me through when her soul went to God.