“God often permits us to fall, to be humbled by our sinfulness” (St. Teresa of Avila).
The love of our Father, always attentive to the salvation of our souls, knows how to include even the weaknesses of our human nature in His plan of salvation. This certainty is very consoling, because generally we cannot overcome our weaknesses overnight, but we have to struggle for a long time and count on the Lord’s help until we manage to restrain them at least moderately. The prospect that God is able to benefit from our failures – which we often find painful, embarrassing, and humiliating – gives us hope and confidence in our Father.
Indeed, our Father’s wisdom may allow a “lesser evil” to avoid a greater one. One of the worst evils is pride, which causes us to feel great and makes it difficult to accept the lessons given to us by the Lord or others. Therefore, pride hinders the work of the Holy Spirit and prevents us from receiving it with a simple and receptive attitude, because it binds us to ourselves and to our own ideas in such a way that we can hardly detach from ourselves. To discover imperfections in oneself and to admit mistakes is an almost impossible challenge to pride.
That is why our Father allows the proud person to experience their weakness, so that they do not exalt themselves, but humbly admit that they can do nothing without the Lord and that they are weak on their own. Our Father may often have to allow such falls because pride can be deeply rooted in the soul. But the love and patience of our Father is even greater than the stubbornness of human pride.