Be always with Christ and trust God in everything.
This maxim is, in effect, a summary of Hopko’s entire list.
It is a call to practise the presence of God or the sacrament of the present moment. It means believing that God is present right now, in this specific situation. God can and must be found and served here.
It implies embracing the specific reality God has given you, including your neurology. For the autistic Christian, this means trusting that your unique wiring is not a mistake rather the way God created you and through which he intends to save you. If your reality involves sensory processing sensitivities, hyperfocus, or social fatigue, then God is present in those experiences, not in spite of them. You do not need to become neurotypical to be ‘with Christ’. God relates to every person in their unrepeatable uniqueness. You do not need to abandon your essential self to find God. On the contrary, it requires you to offer him your true self, including your autistic traits.
Practically, trusting God ‘in everything’ means finding him in the very discomforts that plague the neurodivergent experience. When you are overwhelmed by sensory input and on the verge of a meltdown or shutdown, the temptation is to believe God has abandoned you because you do not feel ‘at peace’ or ‘spiritual’ in a conventional sense. However, we should not fight against our psychological states, but rather gently turn our gaze to Christ amidst the storm. If you are in a state of meltdown or burnout, ‘trusting God’ might simply mean acknowledging, ‘Lord, I am overwhelmed, and I can’t fix it right now, but I know you are here.’
And, this maxim frees us from the pressure to manufacture ‘religious emotions’. Many neurodivergent people experience alexithymia (difficulty identifying or expressing emotions) and may feel defective because they don’t experience the ‘warmth’ or emotional swells described in some pietistic literature. But the Orthodox tradition affirms that true union with God is found in the will and the intellect (the nous) rather than in transient emotions. ‘Being with Christ’ is an act of loyalty, not a mood. If you show up to Liturgy despite the noise or keep your prayer rule despite feeling ‘flat’ or distracted, you are fulfilling this maxim; you are trusting God’s objective presence rather than your subjective feelings.
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