The true riches you have in yourself, and that you can give to God with love, and please Him exceedingly are these: Humility, Confidence, Surrender, and Hope. . . They are the offerings of the poor, of people who know they possess nothing before God. These four riches, which you can certainly give God all the time, make it possible to have great peace of soul despite your faults and failings, assuming you do not love those faults and failings.
The first offering you can give God is not success or greatness or strength or zeal or a fiery devotion. It is humility. I do not mean that you think to yourself, “I have a great deal of the virtue of humility. I am a very humble person.” Not at all. Probably you are proud and, therefore, not virtuous at all. No, the humility you can offer God is your littleness, your spiritual poverty, your acknowledgment that you are lacking in all sorts of good things you ought to have. Be poor in spirit. See how unsatisfactory you are and admit it. God loves humility. Not the humility of a very virtuous man who says “I am a great sinner.” We are not virtuous men. We are failures before God. It is our poverty, our neediness that attracts God’s mercy and love to us. . . It is something that draws God into our souls most intimately and powerfully. Why should you not offer your humility, your lowliness, your nothingness to God? Why should you not realize that this is exactly what God wants from you? It is all you have to give. . . “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” At least all our faults and humiliating qualities and failures and mistakes and perplexities can increase your humility; so the worse sort of person you are, the easier it is for you to be humble and poor in spirit. . .
The second of the riches we can also give God is a child’s gift of confidence. Like humility this can be given to Him by anyone who wants to, because confidence is entirely in Him and not in ourselves or our virtues at all. You trust God’s providence in all things. When you have something to do or endure that is God’s will, whether it is a small or a great thing, you simply commit the outcome to Him and refuse to worry. God is, of course, absolutely worthy of trust, and Our Lord told us not to worry because we are worth a great deal to God, and He has care for us. We shall not have this confidence if we are still dependent on ourselves spiritually, because then our weaknesses and faults will undermine our confidence. But trust in God Who is all powerful and infinite love and mercy should not be shaken by anything at all. So, like humility, this virtue of confidence can be given to God by even the most abject failure in the spiritual life. We can all be humble and we can all trust God. We may not always feel as if we trust God, and may have involuntary fears, but knowing something is God’s will, we can all go ahead and do it with the intention of trusting God. Trust in God depends on His goodness, not our merit. Confidence in God grows with practice and is a very important factor in our spiritual life. . .
The third of the riches we all have and can quite easily give to God is surrender.
. . . We can all surrender ourselves to God. We do so each day in our morning offering, I hope, and we certainly do so whenever we take part in Holy Mass. We then offer ourselves with Jesus to the Father in complete self-giving. We put ourselves in God’s hands for better or for worse. We intend to accept all that He wills. We surrender ourselves to all that happens to us under God’s all-embracing providence, and we surrender ourselves to all the demands of God’s holy will concerning what we should do or not do. Surrender to God does not depend on great holiness. We can all do God’s will and accept it. If anything is beyond us because of our littleness, it is not God’s will for us. So our absolute surrender to God goes with our poverty or humility and with our confidence. They all fit together, and none of them depends on our being strong or successful or spiritually self-possessed. They are all attachments to God, which we can make by an act of determination. They do not depend on our being rich but on our being poor and being conscious of it and even being glad of it because it makes us blessed.
The fourth of the riches we can give God is hope. We have not yet received the full possession of the Kingdom of God. We are not fully united with God yet. We are still living on earth and the things of God are partly hidden by the veil of faith, but it is quite within our power to hope for the reward of heaven, for the possession of God, and for eternal happiness and fulfillment. God wants us to look forward to these wonderful realities. In fact, without hope we cannot have faith or charity.
If you really look at the things we give God of ourselves—humility, confidence, surrender, and hope—you will find that they will lead us to holiness, and to great holiness. . .
Think of all the thoughts and ideas and faults and failings and upsets you have in your relationship with God, all the things that seem to you to keep God away from you to some extent. You will find they all stop being obstacles, although you will not stop trying to overcome them out of love for God, if you say the Our Father, meaning every word, and in an attitude of humility, confidence, surrender, and hope.
