clarity

"When the brilliant ethicist John Kavanaugh went to work for three months at 'the house of the dying' in Calcutta, he was seeking a clear answer as to how best to spend the rest of his life. On the first morning there he met Mother Theresa. She asked, 'And what can I do for you?' Kavanaugh asked her to pray for him. 'What do you want me to pray for?' she asked. He voiced the request that he had borne thousands of miles from the United States: 'Pray that I have clarity.' She said firmly, 'No, I will not do that.' When he asked her why, she said, 'Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of.' When Kavanaugh commented that she always seemed to have the clarity he longed for, she laughed and said, 'I have never had clarity; what I have always had is trust. So I will pray that you trust God.'

"'We have ourselves known and put our trust in God's love toward ourselves' (1 John 4:16). Craving clarity, we attempt to eliminate the risk of trusting God. Fear of the unknown path stretching ahead of us destroys childlike trust in the Father's active goodness and unrestricted love.

"The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some predetermined, clearly delineated (at least to us) plan for the future.

"'To live without risk is to risk not living,' my paternal grandma used to say. The way of trust is risky buisness, no doubt about it."

--from Ruthless Trust by Brennan Manning