308th Meditation
“Restore us, O Lord God of hosts! Let your face shine on us and we shall be safe” (Ps 80:19).
How often we are in need of our Father to lift us up and restore us, and how often He does it! Who is not heard when they turn to Him?
To restore us means to strip us of the heaviness: whether it is the heaviness of our faults, the burden of our many failures, the discouragement of not being as good as we would like to be, the weight of a troubled life, the burden of a difficult situation…
The Lord wants us to come to Him with all this weight… He does not like His children to be swept away by storms, whether they are internal or external. God wants to see us standing firm on secure ground, and to face life with courage and gratitude, receiving it as a gift from His hand and making it fruitful. Surely our Father, in His wisdom, watches over us so that we do not arrogantly fall into the trap of pride. If humiliations can help us to resist these temptations, He will allow them. But humiliations are not meant to bring us down, but to counteract the danger of pride.
We must lift up our eyes to our Father, to keep in mind in all situations that His face shines upon us full of goodness. We so easily forget the Lord and let the shadows of life cloud our spirits. Looking to Him frees us from the attachment to ourselves, which so tenaciously binds our life, weighs it down and burdens others as well.
If Sacred Scripture exhorts us to “carry each other’s burdens” (Gal 6:2), this certainly does not mean that we should unnecessarily burden others. The Lord wants to take up our burdens and, indeed, has already taken them up.
So it will help us to look to the Cross and, together with the Lord, to look to the Father. Then we will be restored and His loving face will shine on us in the Crucified One, who exclaims: “It is fulfilled” (Jn 19:30).