In Unforeseen Events, All Things Are Under Your Care

IN UNFORESEEN EVENTS,
ALL THINGS ARE UNDER YOUR CARE

Fr Luke Veronis

“In unforeseen events, let us not forget that all things are under Your care.” This is a part of a prayer I say every morning written by Saint Philaret of Moscow. St. Philaret was a man who knew both the grandeur and challenges of human life. This one line from his prayer has been speaking to me especially this week: “In unforeseen events, let us not forget that all things are under Your care.”

I have been meditating on these words because these past days have reminded me of the mystery of life. In the past week, I received distressing news about several dear friends. One priest on the threshold of retirement, recently received a diagnosis of early dementia. Imagine, at the age of 67 to realize you have the beginning of dementia. Another childhood friend, who is a priest in his sixties, is facing aggressive brain cancer. Yet another friend, who played a big influence in my life when I was a young adult, who also is at the age of retirement, just found out he has pancreatic and liver cancer. And then, as if the world wanted to make certain there is no safe harbor from this kind of news, one of my recent students, whose presbytera gave birth to a newborn baby only months ago, just went through surgery for thyroid cancer this past Tuesday.

Wow! The Mystery of life. Each day this prayer - “In unforeseen events, let us not forget that all things are under Your care” – takes on renewed meaning. All week I’ve been reflecting on this news and I can’t pretend it’s easy. It’s not. These aren’t statistics. These are people I love.

And then we come to Church today and sing, “Christ is Risen from the dead, by death trampling upon death, and to those in the tombs He has granted life.” Is this why we need the Resurrection? Not as an idea but as a lifeline!

Think about how the Church places before us, on this 3^rd Sunday of Pascha, the Holy Myrrh-Bearing Women. We don’t always linger long enough thinking about what they actually did. They went to a tomb before sunrise. They carried spices to anoint a body they believed was dead. They saw the One they followed, the One they loved, the One in whom they had placed all their hope, tortured, crucified, killed and buried in a tomb. The disciples - the inner twelve - hid behind locked doors afraid while these women rose in the dark and walked toward the grave.

Think about the weight of their walk. They weren’t going to the tomb with hope but were going in love. This reflects something completely different. Hope expects something. Love simply cannot stay away. They went without knowing what would happen. “Who will roll away the stone for us from the door of the tomb?” They had no answer. Yet they went anyway.

That question, “who will roll away the stone?” may be one of the most honest questions in all of Holy Scripture. It is the question of everyone who has ever walked toward something terrible and not knowing how they will get through it. It is the question of my friend facing dementia at a young age, or my friend facing liver and pancreatic cancer, or the young mother recovering from surgery with her infant son waiting for her to return. Of every human being who ever stood before an obstacle they could not move by themselves and had no idea how it would be removed.

The answer the Myrrh-Bearers received was not a plan. It was a Person in who we put our trust. Because we say, “He is not here. He is risen” we can then pray, “And in unforeseen events, let us not forget that all things are under Your care.”

The Resurrection does not remove the stone. I want to say that plainly, because we must be honest in this place. My friends still have their diagnoses. The cancer doesn’t disappear because we believe in the resurrection and celebrate Pascha. The dementia doesn’t reverse because Christ is Risen. We believe in miracles but miracles don’t always happen the way we want. The grief we face is real. The fear is real. The uncertainty for the future is real.

Yet, the Resurrection does something much more profound than remove the stone. It reveals that stone - every stone, every tomb, every diagnosis, every darkness - has already been placed within a larger story. This grander story whose ending does not end in darkness and death. A Divine Story in which God Himself entered into our suffering, took it into His own body, descended into the very place of hopelessness and despair, and came out alive on the other side.

Saint Philaret understood this when he wrote that prayer. That is why his prayer doesn’t say “In unforeseen events, remind us that everything will work out OK.” No, instead he says, “” In unforeseen events, all things are under Your care. Care is not control in the sense of making everything comfortable. Care is presence. Care is the certainty that we are never alone in whatever we face. Care is what the Myrrh-Bearing Women discovered at the empty tomb, how the Messiah they thought was dead had been with them the entire time, working in the silence of that sealed stone, in ways no one could see.

This is the spirit we are called to carry with us every day. Not a naïve cheerfulness that denies difficulty, nor a stoic refusal to grieve, but a deep and unshakable orientation toward the Risen Lord Jesus. We hold suffering close without allowing it to destroy us. We look into the very deep darkness, and don’t pretend it is light, but we look into our deep darkness and say, “God is here.” We look at the tomb and say, “Christ is risen and the tomb doesn’t have the last word!”

None of us knows what each day will bring. Not one of us walked in Church this morning knowing for certain what we will face before next Sunday. Life is a mystery. Yet, whatever this mystery of life brings, we can be assured that we’re not walking into it alone, and we’re not walking into it without hope.

We face every situation as people of the Resurrection. The Risen Christ has changed our perspective of life and our worldview of death!

So, let’s begin each day with Saint Philaret’s prayer on our lips and in our hearts. And when unforeseen events come, and they will surely come, never forget that the same God who rolled away the stone on the first Pascha morning is present with our friend in his diagnosis, present with that young couple and their baby, present with every one of us in whatever private grief or fear or challenge we face.

The Myrrh-Bearing Women went to the tomb in darkness carrying what little they had. They came back in the light carrying the greatest news the world has ever heard. This story shapes our worldview. Darkness surrounds us, yet Light overcomes the darkness!

Thus, we never despair but hold on to His promise. Despair belongs to a world where death has the final word. And we know — we know — that Christ is Risen and has conquered death!

“In unforeseen events, let us not forget that all things are under Your care."

Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen!