The camping trip was going to be great. For months our family had been planning to go backpacking for a few days in the Porcupine Mountains.
The excitement mounted as we packed essentials such as food, matches, and rain gear and made final preparations the week before.
There is something compelling about withdrawing into the depths of nature, surrounded only by God’s beauty and your family.
Our loaded backpacks sat ready and waiting for us to drive up to the wilderness and begin our much-anticipated escape the next morning.
And then . . .
“Mom?” My son knocked on our bedroom door at 5:30 a.m. “I think I have a fever.”
Sure enough, he had a fever of 102 degrees.
He was indeed sick. We had to cancel our trip. Within a short time, we had to pivot away from our backpacks and toward caring for our feverish son.
The disappointment was palpable for all of us. And yet, I watched — amazed — as the children heroically swallowed their hidden tears.
“God must have a good reason for preventing us from going,” I admitted, noting that it was best that the illness struck while we were at home, rather than in the wilderness.
Trusting in God’s plan for us — even when we can’t see for ourselves the good of it — is something at which I’ve never excelled.
My husband and children are far better at it than I am. In fact, I’m learning from them.
Become like a child
Becoming like a little child is how we are supposed to accept God’s will, after all. Children run to their parents with open abandon, in good times and in bad, showering their parents with unconditional love, deep trust, and a desire to please.
So too must we do with our Father in Heaven, in good times and in bad, in times during which we do not understand His plan but must trust that He knows best since He is our Father who loves us beyond our human comprehension.
Even if we cannot feel it in our hearts, we know it in our minds, for we are His children who must fall again and again with trust into His arms.
Childlike trust
St. Thérèse of Lisieux spoke so eloquently of this childlike trust when she said, “Jesus points out to me the only way which leads to Love’s furnace — that way is self-surrender — it is the confidence of the little child who sleeps without fear in its father’s arms.”
Look at what Jesus Himself told his disciples when they asked: “‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven?’ He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me’” (Matthew 18:1-5).
Way to Our Father
Contemplation of what He did for us on the Cross helps give a glimpse of the never ending goodness, mercy, and love that our Father pours out for us, His children, throughout eternity.
With what can we repay this unfathomable goodness, mercy, and love?
Our childlike trust — our simple abandon to our Father in times incomprehensible to our limited human capacity — is a start.
Being like a child is so simple — and difficult — at the same time. But it is the only way to our Father’s heart.
Shedding our “backpacks” that tether us to this world, we need to turn to Him more and more with childlike hearts in every situation, trusting in His plan for us with the surrender that helps us glimpse His otherworldly, eternal love.
Julianne Nornberg, mother of four children, is a member of St. John the Baptist Parish in Waunakee.