We know, from so many aspects of our faith and our lives, that God loves us. He created us and gives us His love unconditionally. That abundant love contains, at its heart, a hallmark gentleness . . . and also a great power.
While the essence of God is love, it is a love united fully with God’s power. This power is in His divine nature, and often referred to in scripture as “the fullness of God.” Much of our spiritual journey is about connecting with God’s power—His strengths—and following as He reveals deeper understandings to us as we work to learn more and to learn better. This becomes a source of help for us, a limitless reservoir of strength that has always been within us and needs to be continually nurtured.
Jesus let His Apostles and all of us know that God invites us to embrace the fullness of being a child of His, to truly believe we live with those strengths within us, and to use this power to find and keep our balance as we face our challenges in life. This is the strength found in Jesus’ consistent Gospel message that “with God, all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26).
One of the key strengths we can continually discover and develop within ourselves—with His help, of course!—is an unconditional trust in God. This is a tiny parallel to His unconditional love for us, but it is so vital and can be surprisingly challenging to pursue. Cultivating an awareness that God’s power resides in us offers a real and meaningful source to draw on to calm our inner spirit when we’re overwhelmed by a difficulty. Recognizing we are not alone (even when it absolutely feels like we are) because we are one in spirit with God, leads us to the transformative spiritual force we need to begin to center our self, to rebalance our fears with our trust in God’s power—and to remember to pray.
Our prayer connects us to God most tangibly; it is the act that ignites the strength we have to begin to deal with any challenge we face. In dialogue with God and His saints, we find the goodness of life and know our own goodness, too. God gives us this power freely, and with it the ability to love, forgive, give . . . and the ability to find our spiritual strength to move forward.
