Chapter 40: Trusting Peace

Lord, your peace holds all suffering

Faith is, presumably, based on trust. We can't fully have faith without trust. So then how is it that we waver, even for a moment, in trusting a man who sacrificed His life for our salvation? A man who suffered and endured relentless torture and pure evil on our behalf?

Is our doubt connected to our free will? Do we feel we are jeopardizing our free will when we release our lives and surrender our will to the will of God? When we offer up what is in our control, do we feel we have been undermined or duped? Is that why it is so hard for us to trust?

Is our doubt in unequivocal trust merely our free will exposing its deepest fear? Or is trust the only true and pure expression of free will?

Christ suffering, Christ dying – these were choices based on trust. It is wildly ironic that we marvel at His trust but doubt our own.

And still, in moments of our most dire suffering (individual or collective) we are surrounded, embraced, absorbed, folded into the gift of perfect peace. .. a gift that Christ earned for us through using His free will to surrender doubt and simply trust.

It is no wonder that some doubt that the image on the Sindone is an instrument of the trust Christ shrouds us with, enfolding us into His forever peace.