Episode Transcript  

One

“Lord, I love your will.”

I know a young family who recently went through something very, very difficult. This story has a happy ending. While the dad was at work, the mother of four went to check on her napping newborn, and he wasn’t breathing. The mother called 9-1-1, and then did CPR on her baby until the emergency responders came. By then, the father had come home too, and both of them rode with their baby to the hospital in the ambulance.

The baby wasn’t doing well. Breathing and heartbeat were irregular, eyes were open and glazed. The father, who is an emergency responder by profession, knew this wasn’t good. But then he heard his wife, this mother who had found her baby not breathing, and who had kept his little system going all by herself, he heard his wife saying, over and over, “Lord, I love your will. Lord, I love your will.” And the father said he couldn’t believe his wife’s faith, and it made him strong.

In the end, the baby recovered perfectly. But here is the point, before the mother knew what God’s will was for her child, that mother was determined to love it.

Two

Anxious for Our Kids

There’s almost no faithful parent who isn’t, in some way, worried about their kids. Some parents have kids who are sick or even dying. And their call is to remember that illness and even death are the path to God, to eternal happiness, to the fulfillment of their kids’ destinies. But what about those of us who are worried for our kids spiritually? 

So many of us are in the position St. Monica, when her son Augustine was off the rails. And yes, Augustine eventually came back to the faith and became a great saint. But we all know stories of other faithful parents whose kids strayed from the faith and never came back. Some parents, parents who pray and worry about their kids for years and years, some of these parents have prayed and worried only to see their children die outside the faith, sometimes in deeply upsetting ways. 

How can we trust God then? How can we abandon ourselves to divine providence then? How can we say, “Lord, I love your will” then?

Three

Are We Really Doing All We Can for Our Kids Spiritually?

The mother who prayed, “Lord, I love your will,” was also the mother who had done CPR on her baby until the paramedics arrived. In other words, she wasn’t someone who had seen her child in trouble and then just anxiously wrung her hands, or instead simply shrugged her shoulders and said, “Well, it’s God’s will.” No, she did everything she could to keep her baby alive.

We might be worried about our kids, but are we praying and sacrificing for them as we should? Our Lady said the Daily Rosary is a powerful means for the conversion of loved ones. Are we praying the Rosary every day? What kind of voluntary sacrifices are we taking on for the conversion of our kids? Are we accepting and offering up everything we did not choose, do not like, and cannot change? 

Prayer and Sacrifice are the first means to help another person to conversion. Have we rooted out all our vices so we can be the best possible example? Are we practicing a daily resolution? Are we going to Confession once a month? Have we apologized to them for the way we’ve been bad examples? And if our kids have died, are we continuing to fast and pray and offer indulgences for their souls? It becomes much easier to trust in divine providence when we’ve done all that can be done on our end. 

Four

Consecrate Your Kids to Our Lady

Finally, it’s worth noting that this mother, the first thing she did when her child wasn’t breathing was to call the experts. She got that baby to the professionals, to those with the maximum resources for keeping her kid alive. Our Lady is the supreme caregiver, the supreme professional when it comes to the spiritual life of our children. When Christ was physically dead, they laid him in the arms of His Mother, and soon, He returned to newness of life.

If our children are spiritually dead or even spiritually sick, we consecrate them to Mary, which means to lay them in her arms, so that everything can be done to restore them to newness of spiritual life. 

Five

“Lord, I Love Your Will.”

How can a mother, faced with the prospect of her dying child, say, “Lord, I love your will”? Because she has come to know that God’s will is always good. That God’s will always means happy endings. That God only permits something sad and brutal for the sake of something triumphantly, dazzlingly joyful. 

Death wasn’t part of God’s original design. Neither was sin. But God allows death, even of our children, because He has something beautiful and good in store. And He allows sin, even the sins of our children, because He has something beautiful and good in store. 

The story of this young family had a happy ending. But the story of everyone who trusts in God, which, as we saw, is easier when you’ve done your part, for everyone who trusts in God, the story will have a happy ending; a happy ending that’s all the happier because it’s a surprise happy ending.

And when we really understand that, when we really believe it, we’ll be able to say, in every circumstance, in every situation, “Lord, I love your will.”  

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