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.

Confidence in God is essentially different from optimism

A clear distinction should be made between confidence in God and the natural sense of security that denotes the optimistic temper—the resiliency that is simply the fruit of a robust vitality. More, this sense of security must collapse and depart, so as to clear the ground for true confidence in God; for it is rooted precisely in that natural attitude of self-assertion which the true Christian is bound to abandon.