He Leadeth Me: An Extraordinary Testament of Faith

by Walter J. Ciszek

If we could constantly live in the realization that we are sons of a heavenly Father, that we are always in his sight and play in his creation, then all our thoughts and our every action would

be a prayer. For we would be constantly turning to him, aware of him, questioning him, thanking him, asking for his help, or begging his pardon when we have fallen. And every true prayer begins precisely here: placing oneself in the presence of God.

Real prayer occurs, as I have said, when at last we find ourselves in the presence of God.

outpouring

Now, with sudden and almost blinding clarity and simplicity, I realized I had been trying to do

something with my own will and intellect that was at once too much and mostly all wrong. God’s will was not hidden somewhere “out there” in the situations in which I found myself; the situations themselves were his will for me. What he wanted was for me to accept these situations as from his hands, to let go of the reins and place myself entirely at his disposal. He was asking of me an act of total trust,

allowing for no interference or restless striving on my part, no reservations, no exceptions, no areas where I could set conditions or seem to hesitate. He was asking a complete gift of self, nothing held back. It demanded absolute faith: faith in God’s existence, in his providence, in his concern for the minutest detail, in his power to sustain me, ...

God would not be there to bear you up. It was something like that awful eternity between anxiety and belief when a child first leans back and lets go of all support whatever—only to find that the water truly hold...

Of course we believe that we

depend on God, that his will sustains us in every moment of our life.

Only when I had reached a point of total bankruptcy of my own powers had I at last surrendered.

By renouncing, finally and completely, all control of my life and future destiny, I was relieved as a consequence of all responsibility. I was freed thereby from anxiety and worry, from every tension, and could float serenely upon the tide

of God’s sustaining providence in perfect peace of soul.

It is in choosing to serve God, to do his will, that man achieves his highest and fullest freedom. It may seem paradoxical to say that our highest and fullest

freedom comes when we follow to the least detail the will of another, but it is true nonetheless when that other is God. I could testify from my own experiences, especially from my darkest hours in Lubianka, that the greatest sense of freedom, along with peace of soul and an abiding sense of security, comes when a man totally abandons his own will in order to follow the will of God.

“Humility is truth” is a spiritual adage that sums it up well, for humility is

nothing more or less than knowing our place before God. Christ’s whole life, from birth to death, was a perfect act of humility that flowed from his total submission to the will of the Father.

Be thankful then, I thought to myself, that God in his loving care sends humiliations your way.

A man of faith is always conscious of God, not only in his own life but in the lives of others. This is the basis of true charity, of that great commandment by which we are instructed to “love God with our whole mind and our whole heart and our whole soul, and our neighbor as ourselves.” Faith, then, is the basis for love; it is in the insight of faith that we understand the fatherhood of God

and the brotherhood of all men.