This article is part of the Marian Mondays Series, a weekly reflection on the mysteries of the rosary by Jonathan Conrad, owner and founder of The Catholic Woodworker. Subscribe to have these reflections and more sent straight to your inbox every week.
It strikes me how confidently Mary tells the servers at the wedding at Cana to “Do whatever He tells you.” There’s absolutely no doubt in her mind that Jesus can remedy the situation when the wine runs dry.
Yet at the same time, she doesn’t tell Jesus what to do or insist that He must do something. She trusts Him completely, knowing that He’ll do what’s right. And in the end, she submits to His will, whatever that is.
This mystery shows us a powerful truth: that confidence in God and surrender to His divine will go hand-in-hand.
There are times when we have to make a decision hoping that it’s what God wants us to do. And at the same time we have to accept when He redirects our path, even if it wasn't what we expected or wanted ourselves.
This mystery brings to mind a conversation I recently had with JR, president of The Catholic Woodworker. We’d sat down to discuss our rosary production goals for the year, knowing that we didn’t have enough rosary makers on staff to meet our projected demand.
By the end of our discussion, we reached the conclusion that if God wanted us to produce that many rosaries, He would make a way. That didn’t mean sitting back and waiting for it to happen on its own—we still had to put in the work. So we posted a job opening for rosary makers, moving forward in confidence that if this was God’s will, He would provide.
Like Mary at Cana, we placed our trust in Christ, fully accepting the possibility that we wouldn’t get enough applicants to reach our goal. And if that happened, it would be God’s way of telling us that we weren’t meant to expand production in the way we’d planned.
But in this case, God did provide. We only needed eight new rosary makers to help us meet our goals, but we ended up getting over 20 applicants instead. Just as Jesus supplied more wine than the wedding guests could have imagined, God gave us more than we expected.
Of course, it’s easy to trust God when His will aligns with our desires, but that’s not always how things play out.
And in those moments especially, we must remember Mary at Cana. We have to confidently ask God for those things that are good and holy, even if those things seem impossible. And at the same time we have to be ready to accept His answer and do whatever He tells us.
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