“The more serene you become in dealing with adversity, the more fruitfully and peacefully God’s plan for you can unfold”. (Inner Word)
For every person, our Father has a plan of salvation that was already in place when the person still lived in God’s thoughts and had not yet entered this world. This plan corresponds to our Father’s love and His holy will to give humanity all that He has conceived for them.
We can discover this plan in our lives under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and follow it without needing to know all its aspects. It unfolds in obedience to our Lord and grants us ever more of the identity given to us by God.
The adversities on this path—resulting from the loss of Paradise, when we still lived in the closest communion with our Father—seem to stand in the way of the unfolding of the Lord’s plan. Yet this is a false impression, for our Father’s plan is unfolding precisely now through the integration of sin and its consequences.
The invitation above to deal with adversity with serenity corresponds exactly to this reality. God incorporates adversity into His plan and trains us to face it with trust. Thus, in the midst of adversity, we come to recognize Him more and more as our loving Father.
Therefore, we can practice serenity not by simply surrendering to the dynamics of adversity, but by holding fast to the trust that God will bring something good out of it. This opens the way for our Father to communicate His plan of love in a simple manner. For us, this becomes a source of merit, for serving the Lord with trust in adversity and in bearing a cross makes our path of discipleship more mature and all the more fruitful.