The next day, Monday, we received a call that we had finally been matched with a birthmother after 6 years of infertility and 3 years in the adoption process. The baby was born that night and we met him Tuesday afternoon. We took our new baby home Wednesday afternoon.
After being home with the baby just over six hours, we learned that the birthmother had a change of heart, and our social workers removed the baby from our house a little after midnight.
Our hearts are broken. Without exaggeration, this was the worst day of our lives. We have never been so sad. We really fell in love with the little guy and thought of him as our own son.
Reading what I wrote just a few days ago, it strikes me as both ironic, and itself providential. I was almost writing to myself a few days in the future. Theology, our understanding of God, is not simply academic. Theology speaks about reality. Theology speaks about the deepest realities of the most important aspects of our lives. Theology gives light to the mystery of our human existence.
Back to Basics: Divine Providence
God’s creation has its own
goodness and order, but it is not a “finished product.” All of creation, including each of us, is in
a “state of journeying” to our ultimate perfection. However, God did not simply create us and
leave His creation abandoned. God’s
providence consists of the dispositions by which God guides all his creatures
with wisdom and love to their ultimate end.
God continues to uphold creation and guide it to its final
perfection. This ongoing protection and
guidance of all creation is called divine
providence.
We believe, of course, that
while God is in ultimate control, we are still free agents of our own
actions. God’s power and wisdom are so
great that He makes use of His creatures as “secondary causes” within His
providential plan. In other words, God’s
providence does not remove our free will.
God not only directs the course of history, but He does so through the free choices of His
creatures.
This providence directs matters
universal, like the formation of all existence, and the plans of nations. But divine providence also cares for the
minutest details of our lives. “Are not
five sparrows sold for two small coins?
Yet not one of them has escaped the notice of God. Even the hairs of your head have all been
counted. Do not be afraid. You are worth more than many sparrows” (Luke
12:6-7).
The greatest challenge to
seeing God’s providence is the scandal
of evil. We experience the existence
of evil in our own hearts, in injustice done to us, and in the physical
suffering of illness and other disasters.
There are times when the evil in the world can be overwhelming: wars,
persecutions, sickness, death, depression, addiction, senseless violence, the
breakdown of marriages and families, poverty, corrupt governments, the
holocaust of abortion…the list could go on.
Where is God’s providence in the midst of all of this?
“The fact that God permits
physical and even moral evil is a mystery that God illuminates by his Son Jesus
Christ who died and rose to vanquish evil. Faith
gives us the certainty that God would not permit an evil if he did not cause a
good to come from that very evil, by ways that we shall fully know only in
eternal life” (CCC 324).
The belief in God’s
providence asks us to make a fundamental decision about our existence. Is all this pain and evil simply
pointless? Is it just the cruel joke of
a random universe? Is there no meaning,
no ultimate justice? Or perhaps there is
a God, but he is either wicked, weak, or unconcerned with us.
Or, will we make a
fundamental decision to trust in God’s goodness and His guidance over
everything? Do we choose to believe that
“in everything God works for good for
those who love him” (Romans 8:28)?
Despite our lack of vision, our shortsightedness, belief in divine
providence is a fundamental decision to believe in meaning, goodness, and
justice, even when we can’t see it now.
Our belief in divine providence in the face of evil is the fundamental choice to hope rather than despair.
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