167th Meditation
“Put your hope in the Lord, be strong,
let your heart be bold, put your hope in the Lord” (Ps 27:14).
The Lord is our strength…
This is the constant experience of those who walk with the Lord through this life and try to fulfill their mission in this world. We are very limited beings and many things are beyond our capacity. But this does not mean that we have to lose hope, but rather that we must realistically accept the limits that God has placed on us. At the same time, our Father often takes us beyond our limits, so that we can say with all certainty, “It is the Lord who has done it!”
When this certainty settles in the depths of our being, it will not only prevent us from falling into our inclinations for pride or discouragement, but it will also give us the courage to face in the Lord the “big things,” if He has put them in our path, without, however, neglecting the “little things.”
Courage and hope are needed to fulfill the task entrusted to us in this life. The Lord will grant them to us in abundance if we focus on Him. Again and again we can renew our strength in Him and take courage, even if it is only to deal with this day that we have to face. But that is enough! If we manage to face this day, we prepare ourselves for the next one to come.
In His Wisdom, our Father has everything in His hands. How well He knows us! He uses every situation in our lives for our good and for our salvation, as long as we seek our refuge in Him. This is the part that is ours and that we must not fail to do.
The verse of the psalm we hear today does not invite us to have just any hope, nor does it convey a merely human optimism; rather, it has in view hope as a theological virtue, grounded in our Father Himself. He is our hope!
Nor does the psalmist allude to a human endurance, but rather to a great courage that is linked to hope in the Lord.
Our Father wants us to understand that we receive all these things from Him when we seek Him. In this way, He draws us to Himself, so that we may live more and more in Him.