Two mice fell into a bucket of milk. The first mouse, disillusioned and lazy, let himself go and gave up. The second did not lose heart and, with his good nature, while swimming, reflected. As he reflected, he understood something important: by churning, milk coagulates. He was encouraged, sped up a little, and after a while the milk turned into cream, then butter, and then he took a leap and got out.
What this little fable wants to teach is that there are two ways of seeing life, or more precisely, of seeing problems in life: fleeing or giving up in the face of them, or facing them positively while trying to find a solution.
While, humanly speaking, solutions are not always found for all problems, nevertheless we must not let ourselves be carried away by pessimism or stop trying to solve the situation in which we find ourselves.
From the point of view of faith, all problems always have a solution. Faith teaches us that problems are situations that Divine Providence permits so that we may attain a grace and ultimately so that we may grow in holiness. St. Thomas explains that God, being the Creator of all things, is also the Governor of all things, that is, “just as nothing can exist without having been created by God, in the same way nothing can exist that is not subject to divine government” (I,103,5).
To understand this correctly it is important to remember that the goal of Divine Government for men is the attainment of eternal life. This means that God in His government does not dispose things for the particular material good of each and every person but for the supernatural good of each and every person, which is eternal salvation.
Precisely for this reason, He often permits evils so that through them men may attain graces that help them to reach the goal of their lives. What we must concern ourselves with is discovering the graces that God wants to send us through each of the situations in which we find ourselves in order to obtain the graces that are behind those events.
Just as the mouse in the fable understood that there was something he had to do in order to save himself and not drown, so too must we understand the situation and do what we must do in order to obtain the grace that God wants to send us. If, on the other hand, in the face of evil we let ourselves be overcome by evil, like the first mouse, the only thing we will achieve is the increasing of evil.
