What feels like punishment may be the path by which God teaches us to trust Him.
By Fr Antony Parankimalil VC
During a retreat for children, I once asked whether anyone knew how many hairs were on his head. One boy immediately raised his hand and gave me an enormous, wonderfully precise number. I asked whether he was certain, and he answered with complete confidence: “Father, I have no doubt. If you have any doubt, you can count and check.” We laughed, but the Gospel had already placed a serious truth before us. Jesus says that even the hairs of our head are counted. What appears insignificant to us is known to God, and not one detail of our life falls outside His knowledge.
That truth becomes difficult to believe when suffering enters our life. We may know the words of Scripture, attend retreats and repeat that God is good, yet when a relationship collapses, a child struggles, an injustice threatens us or a prayer seems unanswered, another voice begins to speak: perhaps God has turned against me; perhaps He is looking for an opportunity to punish me. Isaiah gives us exactly the opposite picture. “The Lord waits to be gracious to you; therefore he will rise up to show mercy to you” (Isaiah 30:18). God is not waiting for the right moment to destroy us. He is waiting to show mercy.
My dear brothers and sisters, the one person who can never be against you is God. Your husband may become tired of you, your wife may misunderstand you, your friends may lose patience, and even people who genuinely love you may not be able to carry everything you carry. I said humorously during the retreat that perhaps the only one who can truly tolerate us is Jesus, but behind the humour is a profound consolation: He knows us completely and does not withdraw His love. The hard road may confuse us, but it does not mean that the God who counts every hair has stopped seeing where we are.
Trust the One Who Sees the Whole Road
In Kigali, a young woman came to me deeply wounded. She had been preparing for marriage for about four years, and because her boyfriend had no job, she saved what amounted to roughly six months of her small salary and gave it to him to begin a chicken business. They hoped that this modest business would help them begin married life. After receiving the money, however, his behaviour changed. He stopped calling, became angry and eventually told her that she had never given him anything. Her savings were gone, the relationship was collapsing and she felt that years of her life had been wasted.
I asked whether she had entered the kind of relationship he wanted before marriage. She told me that she had refused and had insisted that they begin their life through marriage in the Church. When I heard that, I told her to thank God. She looked at me as though I had not understood: “Father, I have lost everything.” I told her that she had lost money, but she had not lost her life. Before she fell into a deeper pit, God had allowed the truth to appear at the edge. The young man might be good in many respects, but he was not meant for her. She could forgive him, release him, allow him to go his way and trust that God would open another door.
I do not say that every disappointment can be explained immediately or that every broken engagement is a direct intervention from heaven. I say that we should not judge the whole road by the pain of one moment. What felt to that young woman like the destruction of her future could also be protection from a future she could not yet see. The loss was real, but it did not prove that God had abandoned her. Sometimes the hard road is the way by which the Lord prevents a greater wound.
The deeper question is therefore not whether human beings are always sincere, dependable or wise. They are not, and neither are we. I used the words recorded in Job 4:18 to press a practical point: even the holiest creature is not the final foundation of our trust. Scripture is not teaching us to become suspicious of everyone or to reject faithful relationships. It is teaching us that the weight of our soul cannot finally rest upon another creature. Human beings see partly, change quickly and can fail even when they mean well. Absolute trust belongs to God alone.
This is why the Divine Mercy image bears the words, “Jesus, I trust in You.” I once heard a testimony that the enemy hates those words because they strike at the centre of his work. He wants us to trust fear, resentment, appearances and human opinion more than Jesus. Saint Therese of the Child Jesus understood that our refusal to trust wounds the heart of Christ. Trust does not mean pretending that nothing hurts. It means bringing the hurt to the One who knows the whole road and refusing to let the present darkness become our final interpretation of His love.
The Holy Spirit Forms Disciples on Tortuous Paths
Sirach describes Wisdom walking with a person on tortuous paths, bringing fear, dread, discipline and testing before returning to gladden that person and reveal her secrets (Sirach 4:17-18). During the retreat I placed the name of Nathan, one of the altar servers standing beside me, into the passage so that we could hear it personally. At first, the Holy Spirit will walk with Nathan on tortuous paths. The Holy Spirit will discipline Nathan until He can entrust him with deeper things, and then He will come back to gladden him and reveal His secrets.
To explain this, I asked the congregation to imagine a small child reaching towards a fire. The flame is beautiful, and the child cannot understand why his mother shouts, “Do not touch it.” He waits until he thinks she is not looking and stretches out his hand again. The mother knows that a warning may not be enough, so she remains close, pulls him back and may even discipline him. The child cries and interprets her action as harshness, but the mother sees what the child cannot see. Her severity is not the withdrawal of love. It is love acting with knowledge.
We often interpret God’s discipline in the same childish way. We see the attractive thing before us, the relationship we want, the money we think we need, the argument we are determined to win or the door we insist must open. When the Lord blocks us, corrects us or allows our plans to become difficult, we say that He is against us. Yet the One who sees the fire also sees the burn, the scar and the consequences that are hidden from us. The tortuous path may be mercy in a form we do not yet recognise.
This is also why I asked the congregation to proclaim the Word of God aloud. When we look at the Word, allow it to enter our eyes and repeat it with our tongues, it purifies the way we interpret our surroundings. Lies occupy a territory when they are constantly spoken, repeated and believed. The Word of God must also be raised over our homes, our parish and this land. We do not bless Australia merely by having Christian names or attending occasional programmes. We bless the land when the truth of God becomes audible through our worship, conduct and witness.
It is not enough to remain in the same spiritual class year after year. Father Joby had told me that the parish celebrates Healing Masses and welcomes many retreats and preachers. These are great gifts, but we cannot attend programme after programme and remain, as I said, in the same “Primary Six” of spirituality. The Holy Spirit is forming disciples, not spectators. He wants to make us trustworthy enough to receive His secrets, and that requires growth, correction, patience and the willingness to be led where comfort alone would never take us.
Do Not Call a Gift a Punishment
Joel and Jessie helped me understand this mystery more deeply. Jessie had been childless for eight years and prayed earnestly for a child. In prayer she sensed the Lord asking, “If I give you a gift, will you receive it?” She answered yes because anything from God must be a gift. Their first child had special needs. They prayed again and received a second child who also had special needs. They had known little about autism, did not know what the future would bring and were overwhelmed by questions about how their children would live and how the family would cope.
Their pain was made heavier by the comments of other people. Some asked how a prayerful, charismatic couple could receive what they called a punishment. They suggested that if Joel and Jessie were truly close to God, their children would not have been born with such needs. This is the cruelty of shallow religious judgement: it looks at a family’s suffering, invents a hidden sin and then speaks as though it knows the mind of God.
In the middle of her agony, Jessie came to understand her family differently. She spoke from her own prayer and from the last words of David in 2 Samuel 23. David describes the godless as thorns that cannot be safely picked up by hand. Jessie believed that God had used the needs of Thomas and Joshua to keep her and Joel near Him, to protect their souls from becoming hard and thorn-like, and to convert the parents themselves. They had first concentrated on changing the children, making them independent and bringing them as close as possible to what the world called normal. In time they felt the Lord saying that the children were already His beloved ones and that the parents needed conversion.
This is the testimony of one family, and it must not be imposed as a universal explanation of disability. A child with autism or any other disability is not a punishment, a spiritual instrument created for someone else’s lesson or a problem whose value depends on changing the family. Every child possesses dignity before God. What I learned from Joel and Jessie was the way grace transformed their own interpretation: the children whom other people pitied became, in their eyes, holy gifts through whom the whole family was drawn into deeper love, detachment and peace.
Joshua had an extraordinary gift for Scripture. At a retreat in Toronto attended by about six hundred people, he wrote three passages for each person. What surprised me was not only his memory but the pattern of what he gave. Again and again, one passage contained correction, another direction and another appreciation. The selections were not merely repeated for everyone. Through him I saw something of the way God looks at each human being: not as a copy of somebody else, but as a unique person with a particular road.
Comparison therefore has no place in the way we raise children or measure spiritual growth. When a mother tells one daughter that she is not as good as her elder sister, the comparison wounds because the younger child knows that she is a different person. God does not form every soul in the same way or on the same timetable. The road He permits for one family cannot simply be used to judge another. His work is personal, and His correction is joined to direction and appreciation.
That last word, appreciation, is important because many of us were raised in cultures where correction came quickly and praise came rarely. My mother often told me to keep quiet. One day she said it before I had spoken. I protested, “Mother, I have not said anything.” She answered that she knew I was about to speak and wanted to warn me in advance. I remember the story with humour, but it reveals how easily we become accustomed to hearing only what is wrong with us.
God is not like that. He corrects because He loves, but He is also waiting for opportunities to raise us, encourage us and acknowledge the good His grace is producing. The Holy Spirit does not discipline us in order to crush our personality. He trains us so that our gifts can become trustworthy. The hard road is not a corridor of humiliation in which God continually tells us that we are failures. It is a school in which correction, direction and appreciation work together.
Saint Paul discovered how unstable human judgement can be when he reached Malta after a shipwreck. As he gathered brushwood, a viper fastened itself to his hand. The islanders immediately concluded that he must be a murderer who had escaped the sea only to be caught by divine justice. When he did not swell up or die, they changed their minds and said that he was a god (Acts 28:3-6). Nothing about Paul had changed. Only their interpretation had changed.
This is what human opinion often does. People may call you a murderer today and a prophet tomorrow, or praise you today and condemn you three days later. If our peace depends on what people currently think, we will never be stable. The same crowd that creates a simple explanation for our suffering may create an equally shallow explanation for our success. We cannot spend our life chasing every judgement and defending ourselves against every voice.
Suffering is especially painful when others interpret it as proof of secret sin. A family receives a child with special needs, a person becomes ill, a marriage enters crisis or a ministry meets opposition, and observers quickly announce that somebody must have done something terrible. Sin has consequences, and Scripture does call us to repentance, but suffering cannot be read so casually. What appears to be punishment may become discipline. What appears to be shame may become the place where grace is revealed. What appears to be loss may be protection.
Hebrews says that discipline seems painful rather than pleasant at the time, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness in those who have been trained by it (Hebrews 12:11). The verse does not call cruelty good, excuse wrongdoing or claim that God directly causes every painful event. It tells us that pain need not remain empty when it is placed before Him. God can use what He permits to form patience, detachment, courage and holiness. The question is not only, “How can I escape this immediately?” It is also, “Lord, what are You forming in me while I walk through it?”
Losing Money Without Losing Grace
I learned this personally while we were building the Divine Retreat Centre in Rwanda. Our contractor was required to use twenty-millimetre steel in a three-storey structure, but we discovered that twelve-millimetre steel had been used instead. The substitution created a serious danger because the building could collapse. We gathered evidence, showed the contractor what had been done and asked him to bring a rectification plan so that the structure could be strengthened and the work could continue safely.
He refused. He became angry and hostile, insisted that he would continue without correction and threatened legal action if we terminated the contract. We were foreign priests, he knew the local system better than we did, and eventually an arrest warrant was brought to me while I was preaching a retreat in another parish. I had often preached Saint Paul’s warning that lawsuits among believers are already a defeat and that it may be better to be wronged or defrauded than to destroy communion through litigation (1 Corinthians 6:7). Now I faced the possibility of imprisonment in a foreign country, and the mission itself appeared to be blocked.
A lawyer on our team advised me that, although I had not initiated the case, I would need to defend myself and file a counterclaim. The advice was understandable, but I could not sleep. I was not mainly afraid of prison. My agony was that the retreat centre might never be completed and the mission we had begun might collapse. I prayed repeatedly: “Lord, what do You want me to do?”
The word that came to me was Hebrews 10:34: “You cheerfully accepted the plundering of your possessions, knowing that you yourselves possessed something better and more lasting.” I could never forget that verse because it spoke directly into the crisis. The answer was not what I wanted. It meant giving the contractor the additional money he demanded, settling the dispute and allowing him to leave the project. We called him, reconciled, paid what was required and released one another. He went his way, and we continued the work.
The centre at Cyeru-Kanzenze in Bugesera was eventually completed, and today people pray there. It is true that we lost money, but we did not lose Jesus. We lost money, but we did not lose grace. Looking back, I could also see the practical wisdom hidden in the surrender. If we had entered a long legal battle, the land could have been sealed and construction stopped for years. Before the case ended, I might have been transferred and the church might never have been built.
This does not mean that Christians are forbidden to report fraud, protect the vulnerable, seek legal advice or use lawful remedies. The unsafe construction had to be stopped, and in many situations justice requires decisive action. The testimony concerns the particular discernment given in that crisis. Sometimes the Lord leads us to fight responsibly; at other times He asks us to release our right to win because the mission, our soul and something “better and more lasting” are at stake.
That experience also exposed something in me. I become furious when I see injustice, and in personal prayer I sensed the Lord saying, “My son, it seems you are not yet ready to suffer injustice and humiliation.” The words did not make injustice unreal. They revealed how easily another person’s wrongdoing could take possession of my interior life. Jesus Himself was abused, yet He did not return abuse; when He suffered, He did not threaten, but entrusted Himself to the One who judges justly (1 Peter 2:23). The deeper victory is not merely proving that I am right. It is refusing to let the injustice remake me in the image of the person who committed it.
Hope That Is Larger Than This Life
A mother once brought to me her daughter, who had been married for eight months and was already pregnant. The young woman had discovered her husband’s infidelity and felt suffocated in the marriage. She told me through tears that she could not imagine living with him for another day, yet she did not want to wound her prayerful mother, who hoped that the marriage might still be saved.
When we asked about the mother’s own marriage, the daughter explained that her father also had been unfaithful and at times physically abusive. The children had urged their mother to leave and once asked whether they should call the police. The mother had answered that she wanted to remain faithful to the covenant she had made before God. The family believed that her perseverance, suffering and concern for her children had shaped the daughter into the person she had become.
I recount the discernment offered in that particular case because it belongs to the teaching, but it must not be turned into a universal instruction that a person should remain in violence or immediate danger. Christian fidelity never requires concealing abuse, refusing police assistance, abandoning safeguarding or declining legal, medical and pastoral help. A covenant is not a licence for one spouse to harm another. Where protection is required, it must be sought. The spiritual point is that a decision made in pain should not be handed over entirely to anger, social pressure or the loudest family voice; it requires truth, safety, prayer and careful discernment before God.
Saint Paul says, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:19). Christianity does not promise that every faithful person will enjoy a smooth earthly life. Our hope is larger than seventy years of comfort. We belong to Christ in this life and beyond it, and therefore suffering, sacrifice and fidelity cannot be judged only by immediate results.
When I asked everyone who had any suffering to raise a hand, even the altar servers raised theirs. We sometimes see children in white robes and imagine that they have no burdens, while the children see the anger, tension and pain that adults overlook. Everybody suffers, but our suffering becomes heavier when we convince ourselves that we alone have been singled out. Some avoid suffering, some reject it, and some slowly learn to bring it into communion with Christ.
“All who want to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Timothy 3:12), yet this word does not end in condemnation. Romans assures us that “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). The hard road is not proof that God has rejected us. Persecution, misunderstanding and discipline may accompany a godly life, but none of them can separate the person who remains in Christ from His mercy.
Listen to God Above Every Competing Voice
The final part of the teaching returned to family influence. I knew a husband and wife who were close to divorce. The wife was the only daughter in her family, the husband was the only son in his, and each remained strongly governed by the expectations of parents. The husband complained that his wife listened only to her family. The wife said that her husband did not respect her and that her parents were the only people who truly loved her.
I brought them back to Jesus’ teaching that a man leaves father and mother, is joined to his wife and the two become one flesh (Matthew 19:4-7). Marriage creates a new bond. It does not require contempt for parents, abandonment of family responsibility or isolation from wise counsel, but it does require the couple to stop allowing either family of origin to control the marriage. I also used Psalm 45:10-11 to speak about leaving the former household and giving full attention to the new covenant. This is spiritual and relational language, not permission for domination, coercion or the silencing of a spouse.
Parents can genuinely love their adult children and still advise from fear, dependency or incomplete knowledge. Mature couples should listen respectfully to trustworthy counsel, particularly where there is danger, abuse, addiction or serious dysfunction. Yet no parent, relative, priest, friend or adviser should replace God or control a marriage by pressure. The couple must seek truth together and learn to stand before the Lord as one flesh.
I remember another woman who came for counselling and said that she had a very big problem: she was thirty-three and not married. I told her that I did not think this was the biggest problem in the world. She insisted that it was. I then told her that four people had come before her with exactly the opposite complaint: their great problem was that they were already married. The humour reveals how easily we imagine that peace lies in possessing the life somebody else has.
From the beginning, the human tragedy has involved listening to a creature instead of listening to God. Eve allowed the serpent’s interpretation to displace the word she had received from the Lord (Genesis 3:1-6). The same temptation continues whenever fear, gossip, resentment, comparison or pressure becomes more authoritative than prayer and Scripture. Human counsel can be wise and necessary, and Christian discernment should never become stubborn isolation. But every voice must be tested before God.
My dear brothers and sisters, the hard road is not always evidence that God has abandoned you. Sometimes He is preventing a greater fall. Sometimes He is exposing a false trust, freeing you from dependence on approval or teaching you that money is not your lasting possession. Sometimes He is asking you to release the need to win. Sometimes the painful discipline is the slow work of making you honest, patient and holy.
At the end of the session, I invited the congregation to place everything on the altar: the betrayal, injustice, family pain, humiliation, fear and questions that had not been answered. To offer these things is not to pretend that they do not hurt. It is to stop interpreting them only through the voices of people and to place them again beneath the mercy of the God who knows every hair of our head.
He is not waiting for an opportunity to punish you. He is waiting to be gracious. Even when the road is tortuous, even when discipline is painful and even when you cannot yet see what is being protected or formed, Jesus remains worthy of trust. We may lose money without losing grace, lose human approval without losing our identity, and walk through suffering without losing the God who knows where He is leading us. Jesus, I trust in You.
Pastoral note: Prayer and spiritual discernment should accompany, not replace, appropriate medical, psychological, safeguarding, financial or legal assistance. Christian fidelity never requires remaining in immediate danger, concealing violence or refusing responsible protection. The interpretation of disability in this article reflects the testimony of the family described and should not be imposed universally on other families.
Adapted and edited from Day Retreat Session Three, delivered by Fr Antony Parankimalil VC at Holy Family Church, Doveton, during the July 2026 Divine Australia programme.