The Greatest Reason To Trust

April 13, 2026

My dear brothers and sisters, Happy Easter!! For me, these days of Easter are the most joy-filled days of the year, when all we can do is offer our praise and thanksgiving to God for the victory He has won for us. We cry “Alleluia!!” because God has saved us from the powers of sin and death and given us the possibility of eternal life.

Without the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we were destined for eternal separation from God. We could never undo the reality of that fi st sin that Adam and Eve wrought on all of humanity. So our loving Father, seeing our helplessness, sent His Son to do for us what we could never do for ourselves. By offering His life for us as the perfect sacrifice, He entered into the realm of the dead and brought up with Him all those He had redeemed into the now opened gates of heaven, and He offers us the promise of attaining that same joyous reality.

However, in the daily struggles of our life, in our experiences of pain and betrayal, failure and discouragement, grief and death, these are realities that we can easily lose sight of. To the heart that is deeply hurting, the Easter promise might merely feel like empty words. How can light come to scatter the darkness when the darkness feels so great? That is where the virtue and grace of trust enter in. When we cannot see God working, we trust that He is. When we do not know what God is doing, we trust that His plan is better than our own. When we feel consumed by darkness, we trust that light will come. When we feel the weight of Good Friday, we trust in the hope of Easter Sunday that will make the present suffering feel like a distant memory.

St. John Paul II famously said that we are an Easter people. The reality is that it takes trust to be an Easter people. The promise of eternal life will not always seem visible or tangible to us. The temptation to doubt the promises of God might seem too great for us. Yet just as we know the sun is shining though we cannot see it behind the clouds, we are invited to choose to trust in the action of God, no matter what our emotions or perceptions might seem to say.

Trust is perhaps one of the most difficult movements of the Christian life because it invites us to choose a reality that we cannot see. What enables us to make that choice is when our trust is rooted in a person. God’s unending, unbroken, and perfect faithfulness gives me a firm foundation to choose trust in every moment. God has never let us down, never failed to keep His promise, and never turned His back on us. How could I doubt Him in the future when His past actions are utterly faithful? It is relationship that makes real trust possible. If you struggle to trust, my invitation is not to simply “try harder” to not doubt or be afraid. Instead, recommit more fully to your relationship with God. In Him and Him alone do we have the fullest reason to
trust. This is the inspiration for my episcopal moto, “In Deo Tantum,” or in English, “In God Alone.” In Him Alone do we fi d rest, peace, and fulfillment. When He is our rock, we shall not fear.

My dear brothers and sisters, as we celebrate these days of Easter, our God has given us the greatest reason to trust: not even death can stop Him from working, not even death can keep us from eternal life in heaven. May we never doubt the promises that God has made to us, and choose to live by those promises every day.