“Rejoice, for God holds you so firmly in His hand that you need not lean on your own security” (St. Hildegard of Bingen).
St. Hildegard of Bingen offers us a wonderful invitation that will grant us great freedom if we follow it. We love to lean on our own security so that we always have a solution at hand. Instead, Hildegard exhorts us to place all our trust in the hands of our Father, who can truly provide us with the security we need.
In today’s sentence, we almost seem to discover a note of humor on the part of the saint, who certainly knew her sisters in community and also herself very well, with that tenacious human inclination to take the reins and to turn all things upside down, imagining all possible situations in order to be equipped. Who does not know that tendency?
However, we can experience the joy that St. Hildegard speaks of. Once we have relinquished our own securities, or when things have simply not worked out as we expected, we can discover God’s loving hand.
In this context, I always like to share a short anecdote from my time in Africa. I was traveling in a fully loaded car on one of the Congo’s unsafe roads. It was getting dark, and it was safer to reach a village and spend the night than to do so in the middle of the road. However, the car slid down a small sand hill. I began to worry about our safety, and I’ll never forget the confident and trusting reaction of one of the Congolese passengers. He simply said, “The Lord won’t leave us out here in the open all night.” And so it was! The car was able to get back on track, and we arrived at the next village just before nightfall.
To this day, the Congolese man’s faith and this experience fill me with joy and gratitude for our Father. God had us firmly in His hands!