He who trusts in God never forgets the words of the Lord, “The very hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matt. 10:30). He knows that, even though we be far from Him, God is always near to us. He does not confine the operation of God to the limits that our rational thinking is wont to draw to it; rather he believes that, whether we turn our attention to God or not, we are continually in the hands of God and secure in His all-powerful and all-wise love.

Confidence in God also requires the consciousness that the glance of God penetrates everywhere and that nothing at all can escape it, should we even attempt to flee from its ken. “If I ascend into heaven, Thou art there; if I descend into hell, Thou art present” (Ps. 138:8). No matter what we do, and though we try ever so hard to hide ourselves, we are and remain the property of God and utterly impotent to elude Him: “I am the Lord, who search the heart, and prove the reins” (Jer. 17:10). Yet, no less definitely must we know that He from whom we cannot escape is infinite holiness and eternal love, “the great delight of our souls” (Laud of St. Francis of Assisi); He of whom the Psalmist says: “O taste, and see that the Lord is sweet” (Ps. 33:9).

We must believe that we are each called individually by God

Finally, confidence in God implies the belief in our being called—as it were, addressed—by God. “I, the Lord, have called thee in justice, have taken thee by the hand, and have preserved thee” (Isa. 42:6). That consciousness of being called (which we have seen to be an element of humility) is equally relevant to what may in the full sense be termed confidence in God.

And the contrary attitude—that of considering ourselves, so to speak, excluded from God’s sphere of concerns; of contemplating the God of infinite love merely as onlookers; of deeming ourselves, in false modesty, too unimportant and unworthy to refer the divine call to ourselves—is not only inconsistent with humility but also indicates a deficiency in faith. For God not only loves us, He also wills to be loved by us. To each of us, too, Christ addresses the question He asked three times: “Simon, son of John, dost thou love me?” The mysterious word He pronounced on the cross—Sitio (I thirst)—expresses a never-ceasing call for our love.

Confidence in God, then, demands a vital faith in the integral message of the Gospels. But it demands more than that. Beyond giving credence to what the Faith proposes to us, we must relinquish the base on which we are primarily established and which provides us with our natural security, and must fully remove our center of gravity from our nature into God. We must definitively renounce the concept of attaining our goal by our own natural forces, and expect everything from the holy new life that Christ has infused into us in Baptism.