Hard

The hummingbirds loved to forage in this flower's
blossoms

Sometimes people tell me I am hard on myself, and other people. But if I were not hard enough, I would accomplish nothing worthwhile, and I only expect people to do the utmost that they can, realizing the power of God at work in people to change the landscape of earth into a lush garden where silence allows our minds to hear God and respond to Him.

If i were indeed hard on others, that would be a fault, and a sin, because God moves us within ourselves and  has no need of anyone else's effort unless He has requested it.

I expect people to do good because it is beautiful to see love flourish, being expressed and thereby given the opportunity  to be happy.

I do not expect God will permit me a sin of pleasing myself because I am some special character. The fact that He allows illness and pain reasserts His power in us, and the appreciative soul is glad for it, especially when it goes away <s>.

But we need, as sinful people, to repent and show the gratitude we should have been pouring forth into His Heart. Our failure through sin, costs us minutes of our life that were wasted, when it might have been better spent simply giving thanks for God and our friends and ourselves.

Certainly this fits in with the coming penitential season of Lent during which we are confronted with  the monstrous cruelty imposed by men on Christ, who died in love with us, even while we paid Him no attention at all, while were whiling away our time on frivolities.

Having so recently encountered the physical and spiritual side of illness, my heart is fresh cut open sharing His love with me, His passion life. It is a side we do well to confront periodically by confronting what happened to Jesus, and by realizing that He went through everything He suffered for our love, even knowing all the while that we would be incapable of rising to the occasion. He knew too that we would be hungry for a way to atone for that weakness and failure, to mend the injury we caused. In order to hear Him tell us what we can do tor Him, we will have to forget our faults and sins and realize He has forgiven us and prayed for our future perfection. He created no junk; He did not make garbage, but people make themselves into such monsters, sometime, that all we can do is look down and weep.

Jesus wept for us realizing what we would encounter in what He asks us to do.  We should share with one another, in some way, the beautiful things we discover. The little bits of beauty we share with each other, like the little love we share with each other is in no way trivial in the mission of Jesus to win hearts to Himself. But we cannot approach Him paralyzed with selfish concerns, fearful of what He may ask of us and which we might discover we are not strong enough to lift. One man might not lift the cross from Jesus as He lay gasping on the ground when He fell under the cross, and one woman might not be able to do anything but touch His cheek for a moment to convey a tenderness. But if all of us spiritually connect and lift our hearts to Jesus, we must be able by our mutual strength to overcome weakness and pain in order to connect with him and feel His Spirit coursing through us like a lightening bolt.