I love music. It’s always been one of my favorite joys, and long before I came back to the Faith, songs were the primary means God used to draw me to Him. I must not have made it easy when I was blasting Def Leppard and Boston 24/7, but somehow He still managed to sneak a good verse in here or there and touch my heart through it.

Nowadays, the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist Pandora station is my favorite. There’s just something different about listening to the radio, though, and we all really enjoy it, so we often switch back and forth between Pandora and that.

We live in the Most-of-the-Books-of-the-Bible Belt. We don’t get any Catholic music stations here, so, when we listen to the radio, it’s often tuned to a praise music station. I don’t think of most of the songs on the airwaves as worship music (because to me, worship is about the ways God is “above us”), but they’re clean and seek to draw us closer to Him, so that’s what our radio is usually tuned to.

The other day, one of these songs reminded me of something very Catholic that I had nearly forgotten–and I hope it will encourage you, too…so I wanted to tell you a little about what happened.

The song was “Thy Will”, by Hillary Scott. Now, this lady has been through the wringer, and God brought great beauty out of it. She suffered a miscarriage, and the lyrics, about accepting God’s will even when it’s hardest, were fruit of the pain. It’s very honest, and people have received it well; as of this writing, the Vevo video had been up about a month, and it had 722,148 views, even though the album hadn’t been released yet.

As I heard the opening lines of this song for the first time a few weeks ago, they really hit home. Our family has been “through the wringer”, too, for the better part of two decades now, and we live each day with the knowledge that the pain and crises could resurface at any moment. As Mrs. Scott sang about accepting God’s will, using Christ’s well-known phrase from the Agony in the Garden that we, as Catholics, often repeat when we’re hurting (“Thy will be done”), I said a prayer of thanks to God that a very faithful view of suffering had helped this songwriter through her pain.

Then, a few bars later, came words to help me through mine. In the bridge of the song, she tied the line “Thy will be done” to the lines from Jeremiah 29 that tell us that God hears us when we pray and that His plans for us are good.

Those few lines reminded me of something really important that I had begun to lose sight of over the past few years—that we don’t just accept suffering out of resignation, because we’re willing to endure the pain (although that is definitely a crucial part of our ministry). We accept the suffering because we trust God—we trust in His total goodness and His love—yes, towards those we are suffering for—but also for us. For each of us. The message of our faith is clear: God’s will is nothing to be afraid of, and we are very, very dear to Him.

We accept trials, knowing that however much it hurts now, He really is going to make “all things work together for the good of those who love Him”. He really is going to bring something more beautiful out of it than we could ever imagine. (I know, I know: DUH!!! Right? :-))

I don’t mean this in an “If you do right, your life will be easy” kind of way. We may never see the fruit this side of Heaven, and trying to please God doesn’t guarantee a pain-free life. Sirach 2, the Crucifixion, and the saints all make it very clear: “When you come to serve the LORD, prepare yourself for trials.” The Christian life requires suffering. As Padre Pio said, “There is no flowering of the soul to the beauty of its perfection except at the price of pain.”

But God is all-good, and He loves us. When we know this—really know it at a cellular level in our hearts— we can say, “Thy will be done” not just with a fearful resignation, but with gladness, with trust, and even with joy–because we’re not only accepting the trials, but hoping in the abundant fruit God will bring out of them, too.

Originally published August 17, 2016