93. Whoever renounces the world and worldly things with unhesitating faith in God believes that the Lord is compassionate and merciful and that He receives those who come to Him in repentance. But he knows, too, that God honors His servants with dishonor, enriches them with the utmost poverty, and glorifies them by means of insults and scorn, making them through death participants and inheritors of eternal life. Through such trials the servant of God is impelled like a panting hart to the deathless fountain (cf. Ps. 42: 1);and through them he climbs upwards, as though up a ladder on which angels ascend and descend (cf. Gen. 28:12;John 1:51) in order to help those who are mounting.
God is enthroned above, observing the strength of our intention and diligence, not because He enjoys seeing us struggle, but because He wishes, compassionate as He is, to give us our reward as if it were something He owed us.
94. The Lord never allows those who come to Him unhesitatingly to fall completely. When He sees them faltering He helps them in their efforts, stretching a hand of power down to them and drawing them up to Himself. He works with them visibly and invisibly, consciously and unconsciously, until, having climbed every step of the ladder, they draw near Him, wholly united with Him in His wholeness and forgetting all that is earthly. Whether they are there with Him in the body or out of the body, I cannot tell (cf. 2 Cor. 12:2); but they dwell with Him and enjoy His ineffable blessings.