He Leadeth Me: An Extraordinary Testament of Faith

by Walter J. Ciszek

For every man’s life contains its share of suffering; each of us is occasionally driven almost to despair, to ask why God allows evil and suffering to overtake him or those he loves.

It is impossible to describe the feeling that comes over you at such a time. The feeling that somehow, in an instant of time, everything is changed and nothing again will ever be quite the same. That tomorrow will never again be like yesterday. That the very trees, the grass, the air, the daylight are no longer the same, for the world has changed.

He was leading them, through every trial and in every age, to the realization that God alone is faithful in all tribulations, that he alone is constant in his love and must be clung to, even when it seems all else has been turned upside down.

It is the status quo that we rely on, that carries us from day to day, and somehow we begin to lose sight of the fact that under all these things and behind all these things, it is God who supports and sustains us.

God must contrive to break through those routines of ours and remind us once again, like Israel, that we are ultimately dependent only upon him, that he has made us and destined us for life with him through all eternity, that the things of this world and this world itself are not our lasting city, that his we are and that we must look to him and turn to him in everything.

The upheavals in this world, or in the Church herself, are not the end of everything, especially of his love.

Any young man or woman who has felt called to a vocation and then hesitated, wondering if the call is genuine, knows the agonies of such second thoughts and how powerful the counterarguments can be.

We had entered upon what we thought was a great missionary endeavor, full of zeal and enthusiasm, only to come smack up against reality.

It is the same temptation faced by everyone who has followed a call and found that the realities of life were nothing like the expectations he had in the first flush of his vision and his enthusiasm. It is the temptation that comes to anyone, for example, who has entered religious life with a burning desire to serve God and him alone, only to find that the day-to-day life in religion is humdrum and pedestrian, equally as filled with moments of human misunderstanding, daily routines, and distractions as the secular life he left behind in the world.

It was the grace quite simply to look at our situation from his viewpoint rather than from ours. It was the grace not to judge our efforts by human standards, or by what we ourselves wanted or expected to happen, but rather according to God’s design. It was the grace to understand that our dilemma, our temptation, was of our own making and existed only in our minds; it did not and could not coincide with the real world ordained by God and governed ultimately by his will.

His will for us was the twenty-four hours of each day: the people, the places, the circumstances he set before us in that time.

Ultimately, we come to expect God to accept our understanding of what his will ought to be and to help us fulfill that, instead of learning to see and accept his will in the real situations in which he places us daily.

The plain and simple truth is that his will is what he actually wills to send us each day, in the way of circumstances, places, people, and problems. The trick is to learn to see that—not just in theory, or not just occasionally in a flash of insight granted by God’s grace, but every day. Each of us has no need to wonder about what God’s will must be for us; his will for us is clearly revealed in every situation of every day, if only we could learn to view all things as he sees them and sends them to us.

His way of consoling me, however, as had happened so often in the past, was to increase my self-knowledge and my understanding of both his providence and the mystery of salvation.

Solitary confinement, in short, must be very much like what some theologians paint as the principal torment of hell:

The human mind is restless, and it cannot be confined. It will go on, every waking hour, thinking of something, recalling something, dreaming of something, or dreading some future happening with present fear and anxiety. You can control this restlessness, you can channel it, but you cannot stop it.

Time may seem to stand still, but the human mind is never quiet.

Slowly, reluctantly, under the gentle proddings of grace, I faced the truth that was at the root of my problem and my shame. The answer was a single word: I. I was ashamed because I knew in my heart that I had tried to do too much on my own, and I had failed. I felt guilty because I realized, finally, that I had asked for God’s help but had really believed in my own ability to avoid evil and to meet every challenge. I had spent much time in prayer over the years, I had come to appreciate and thank God for his providence and care of me and of all men, but I had never really abandoned myself to it. In a way, I had been thanking God all the while that I was not like the rest of men, that he had given me a good physique, steady nerves, and a strong will, and that with these physical graces given by God, I would continue to do his will at all times and to the best of my ability. In short, I felt guilty and ashamed because in the last analysis I had relied almost completely on myself in this most critical test—and I had failed.

I was so intent on hearing only one message, the message I wanted to hear, that I was not really listening at all.

This tendency to set acceptable conditions upon God, to seek unconsciously to make his will for us coincide with our desires, is a very human trait.

And yet that moment of failure was in itself a great grace, for it had taught me a great lesson.

Even though our Lord had promised that he, being once converted, would confirm his brethren, I doubt very much that Peter ever again boasted that he would never desert the Lord even if all others deserted him.

And the greatest grace God can give such a man is to send him a trial he cannot bear with his own powers—and then sustain him with his grace

What we tend to forget, though, is the very folksy truth that God by his Incarnation took on a human body. We don’t often stop to reflect on the most basic meaning of this doctrine: that God, too, knows exactly how it feels to be cold, or tired, or hungry, or sore with pain, because he, too, has had a body. He has spent long hours, for years at a time, doing the routine and unspectacular work of a carpenter, has walked long days over dusty roads with tired feet, has curled his shoulders against the night air or a chill rain, has been without sleep while others slept, has been thirsty and hot and weary and ready to drop from exhaustion.

There is a tremendous truth contained in the realization that when God became man, he became a workingman. Not a king, not a chieftain, not a warrior or a statesman or a great leader of nations, as some had thought the Messiah would be.

For all the rest of the time of his life on earth, God was a village carpenter and the son of a carpenter. He did not fashion benches or tables or beds or roof beams or plow beams by means of miracles, but by hammer and saw, by ax and adze.

Work cannot be a curse if God himself undertook it; to eat one’s bread in the sweat of one’s brow is to do nothing more or less than Christ himself did. And he did it for a reason. He did it for years on end, he did it for more than three-quarters of his life on earth, to convince us that God has not asked of us anything more tedious, more tiring, more routine and humdrum, more unspectacular than God himself has done.

If anyone asked me whether I would be willing to suffer and die for the faith, I would have said yes, I suppose. Such things are easy to say when the threat is vague and faith is strong.

God could be counted on when man could not; he would help even if friends and all else failed.

The grinding routine of daily labor, even here in Siberia, could have a meaning, did have a value, even as the lives of all men everywhere—no matter how dull or routine or insignificant they might seem to the eyes of men—have a value and a meaning in God’s providence.

It is the seeming smallness of our daily lives and the constancy of things that cause our attention and our good intentions to wander away from the realization that these things, too, are signs of God’s will.

My first concern, instead, should be to follow wherever he led, to see his will always in the events of my life and follow it faithfully, without question or hesitation.

For it is not man or what he does that counts most in the plans of divine providence, but rather that a man accepts in confidence and fulfills to the best of his ability each day what God has chosen for him.

Be consoled, you idiot, I said to myself, but don’t be fooled! It was the same God who arranged for that joy in order to strengthen and console you and who has now arranged your abrupt and humiliating departure from the scene to remind you once more that all things on this earth are governed by his providence and not man’s efforts.

every time you tried to do something on your own, to plan ahead, to work out answers beforehand, you made a miserable mess of your efforts and had to learn all over again to look for God’s will in the situations and circumstances.