Some time ago I was sitting with some friends and one talked about being single and waiting patiently for 
the right person to come along. She wasn’t in a rush and Mr. Right would just have to find her when it was the right time. Her friends even said things like “Don’t worry, hon. It’ll happen.”
I started to think something awful: “Well, what if he doesn’t?”
The problem was that I said that out loud.
I had a group of people looking at me, wondering why I would say such a thing? But the truth of the matter was that I really have seen people want a lot of things and then they didn’t get them.
And boy, that got them angry. Angry with God for not giving them what they want. But perhaps that’s the “Santa Claus God.” The one who we pray to for things that we want and hope he dispenses them to us from his bag o gifts.
But don’t we already have all the gifts we need? God has already given us his own body and blood. God breathes life into us. God suffers along with us when we are hurting.
The truth is that God is always with us and never abandons us. And if that’s true, then everything else is a wash. We need to be faithful enough to believe that somehow, someway, even in our darkest hours, that God has something for us, has room for us, has redemption for us.
So if Mr. Right doesn’t come along, God still does and offers us something else. That something else may be more wonderful than we imagined.
It’s what St Ignatius of Loyola callls:
“a complete indifference with regard to all created things, not preferring health to sickness, riches to poverty, honor to humiliation, long life to a short one. We wish only for those conditions that will aid our pursuit of the goal for which we have been created.”
That in sickness, even sickness that results in death, God still gives us something. God still stays with us in the darkness, in loneliness, in pain and suffering. Whatever might befall us, painful though it is, God has the power to change us into people marked for others by our experience.
When we worry, we seem to be saying, “God can’t get me out of this jam.” We all want a God who saves us, but God doesn’t save us–God moves with us through suffering facing his own death, death on a cross. And in that moment we have redemption, because no matter what befalls God, God still lives on and more importantly, God still loves on.
Could we be free enough from our own wants to believe what Ignatius proposes?
That one shouldn’t over-worry about getting sick, about not getting married, or not being able to conceive children or not getting a promotion. Why? Because God will still take care of us in some way if we just remain open enough to what’s offered to us.