The following are excerpts from “Searching for and Maintaining Peace: A Small Treatise on Peace of Heart” by Father Jasques Philippe (pgs 27-34)

The Troubles of Life and the Fear of Being Without

Our great drama is this: Man does not have confidence in God. Hence he looks in every possible place to extricate himself by his own resources and renders himself terribly unhappy in the process rather than abandon himself into the tender and saving hands of his Father in heaven. Yet, how unjustified this lack of confidence is! Isn't it absurd that a child would thus doubt his Father, when this Father is the best and most powerful Who could exist, when He is the Father in heaven? In spite of that, it is in this absurdity that we most frequently live.

How many young people, for example, hesitate to give their lives entirely to God because they do not have confidence that god is capable of making them completely happy. And they seek to assure their own happiness by themselves and they make themselves sad and unhappy in the process.

This is precisely the great victory of the Father of Life, of the Accuser: succeeding in putting into the heart of a child of God distrust vis-a-vis his Father!

It is, however, marked by this distrust that we come into this world. This is the original sin. And all our spiritual life consists precisely in a long process of reeducation, with a view to regaining that lost confidence, by the grace of the Holy Spirit Who makes us say anew to God: Abba, Father!

But it is true that this "return to confidence" is very difficult for us, long and painful.

There are two principal obstacles.

Our difficulty in believing in providence.

The first obstacle is that, as long as we have not experienced concretely the fidelity of Divine Providence to provide for our essential needs, we have difficulty believing in it and we abandon it. We have hard heads, the words of Jesus do not suffice for us, we want to see at least a little in order to believe!

It is important to know one thing: We cannot experience this support from God unless we leave him the necessary space in which He can express Himself. As long as a person who must jump with a parachute does not jump out in the voice, he cannot feel that the cords of the parachute will support him, because the parachute has not yet had the chance to open. One must first jump and it is only later that one feels carried. And so it is in the spiritual life: "God gives in the measure that we expect of Him," says Saint John of the Cross. This is where the problem lies. Many do not believe in Providence because they've never experienced it, but they've never experienced it because they've never jumped into the voice and taken the leap of faith. They never give it the possibility to intervene.

The Fear of Suffering

The other great obstacle to abandoning oneself to Divine Providence is the presence of suffering, in our own lives as in the world around us. Even for those who abandon themselves to him, God permits suffering; He leaves them wanting of certain things, in a manner sometimes painful. ...the Lord can leave us wanting relative to certain things (sometimes judged indispensable in the eyes of the world), but He never leaves us deprived of what is essential: His presence, His peace and all that is necessary for the complete fulfillment of our lives, according to His plan for us. If He permits suffering, then it is our strenth to believe, as Therese of Lisieux says, that "God does not permit unnecessary suffering."

In the domain of our personal lives, as in that of the history of the world, we must be convinced, if we want to go to the limits of our Christian faith, that God is sufficiently good and powerful to use whatever evil there may be, as well as any suffering however absurd and unnecessary it may appear to be, in our favor. We cannot have any mathematical or philosophical certitude of this; it can only be an act of faith. But it is precisely to this act of faith that we are invited by the proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus, understood and received as the definitive victory of God over evil.

Evil is a mystery, a scandal and it will always be so. It is necessary to what one can to eliminate it, to relive suffering, but it always remains present in our personal lives, as well as the world. There are inevitable circumstances where we cannot understand the "why" of God's activity because it is no longer the wisdom of man, a wisdom within our capacity to understand and explain by human intelligence. Rather it is divine Wisdom, mysterious and incomprehensible, that thus intervenes.

The wisdom of man can only produce works on a human level. Only the Wisdom of God can realize things divine, and it is to divine heights that it destines us.

This is consequently what must be our strength when faced with the question of evil: not a philosophical response, but the confidence of a child in God, in His Love and in His wisdom.

To Grow in Confidence: A Child’s Prayer

And how does one grow in this total confidence in God; how can we maintain and nourish it in ourselves? Certainly not only by intellectual speculation and theological considerations. They will never withstand the moments of trail. But by a contemplative gaze on Jesus.

To contemplate Jesus Who gives His life for us, nourishes us with "too great a love" that He expresses on the cross; that is what really inspires confidence. Would not the supreme proof of love - Greater love than this no man has than to lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13) - untiringly contemplated and captured in a gaze of love and faith, fortify our hearts little by little in an unshakable confidence? What can one fear from a God Who manifested His love in so evident a manner? How could He not be for us, completely, entirely and absolutely in our favor; how could He not do all things for us, this God, friend of humankind, Who did not spare His only Son for us, even through we were sinners? And if God is for us, who could be against us (Romans 8:32)? If God is for us, what evil could possibly harm us? Thus we see the absolute necessity of contemplation for growing in confidence.