There’s a fine line between hope and despair.

We cannot give up. Yet it sounds like that’s exactly what the saints want sometimes. Saint Paul talks about preferring to die than to live:

For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling… Yes, we do have confidence, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. (2 Cor 5:1–2, 8)

And Blessed Charles de Foucauld seems to want even less success than that:

If I were able, but I am not, to do otherwise than to lose myself totally in union with God’s divine will, I would want to choose for myself complete lack of success and perpetual solitude and failure in everything. This is the path of union with the lowliness and the cross of our Beloved God, which has always seemed to me desirable above all other ways.

Why? Because they haven’t really given up. They’ve just let God have his way in everything. Their thoughts are little and his, being infused from on high, are great. What does success matter? What does comfort matter? What does opinion matter, if God knows what he permits and is worthy of our trust?

Just go with God, and do the work that appears. Yes, there is reason enough in the secret, peaceful, loving infusion of love that passes above our understanding and overflows, without noise and commotion, onto those we encounter. And yes, if everything failed, we would be so alienated from our world and ourselves as to only have God – which God could only ever give when he thinks we’re ready. And yes, if we died in grace, the union would become all the greater and more permanent.

But all that is really the opposite of giving up. When the saints want to give up, it means the opposite.