The only chance you will get of making a difference is if you are there. A word at the right moment can carry a great deal of weight. Better yet, the statement you make by always being there is immense.
The Lord chooses to feel like us, and to be as vulnerable as we are. We might get hurt, we might be wounded, we might feel as if a wall of stone has fallen on us, but if you still your thoughts and be quiet, He will speak, and you will be made wonderfully.
Terrible things are waiting to happen, and the ONLY way the United States will survive is if everyone pulls the oars together. If you floudner around in political games, your suffering will be ten times worse. in addition, nations that have need of assistance won't get it because we will have been flattened by disasters and can't help. Let that sink in. Pray for one another. Help one another. Speak a word of encouragement and kindness and forget political garbage. When the country has been shaken down, only those who look out for one another will have any slightest aid or comfort. Jesus receives assistance from the prayers and kindneesses of others, and He remembers even the smallest sip of water.
There is no such thing as getting rid of one's own will. One can surrender his will to Him as totally as possible, and trust Him for the little He sees we are still attached to our own will.
For some, that is not difficult, but for others, it can be searing as any surgery without anesthesia. Still, our mortal nature limits how much pain we can absorb, and nature protects us against excesses. The best we can do is do as He wishes, and trust.
I would wish the mess we have in Washington DC might be transformed complettely by some magic, but what magic can we weild against the kind of evil that prevails? In willing what He wills, we again, can go only so far before our limits have been reached. Fortunately, the fact that Jesus allowed Himself to be crucified means that He is capable of things we cannot imagine.
That we can assist Him with our penaces and acceptance of trials is irrefutable. That is why there are contemplatives and those dwelling in silent solitude.
Pray for each other and for the work of the Lord in each life. The day is coming when we will be able to see, and then we will rejoice.
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How do you love yourself when you are crucified? You must, because His love will never cease to make you more one with Him through the pain itself. The key to the heart of those you seem unable to reach with the touch of His kindness is directly related to depths of His crucified pain.
Do not scrap the spirituality you grew up with for something new and shiney. There are lots of Youtube videos making statements about how people should pray and how they should do the most innocuous things these days.
A humble attitude is your most important attribute as a human being. Praying to God to help your prayer and attitude is absolutely beyond priceless. How you hold a rosary or your prayer posture is not more important than your attititude.
I humble myself in the dirt at the foot of the cross where I belong because of my sins, and I ask you, Lord, to be made acceptable in all things in my life so I may grasp my salvation and enjoy your loving kindness in spite of my faults.
A lackadaisical attitude IS dangerous; a lack of gratitude and faith will lead you to become disrespectful and lose your all important salvation.
Our very weakness and blindness to spiritual realities can ennervate faith by which we see the unseen and our behavior toward the Almighty will suffer.
At the same time, speak how you feel toward the Lord, with respect, and honor Him as your creator.
Spend the time you have in prayer. God is the one who made you and gave you the time in which you live. Meanwhile, realize that we are blind to spiritual realities, and we must want to see Him and be aware of Him if we are to have any chance of deporting ourselves with a proper attitude.
The saints went off to hidden places to have solitude in which to speak to Him and to see Him as He is, whether you are gifted with insight or consolations, or not.
Do not despise His gifts, but graciously accept them, acknowledging their Source. If you lack reverence or respect, do not expect gifts from the Lord. The spouse of our souls deserves the most respectful attitude, and if our love is to blossom, we need to make time for Him and we need to listen closely in solitude and silence.
This may mean difficult moments for someone just beginning a life of prayer. But to remember that He was crucified in our place helps immensely. You may expect opposition the more you spend time with the Him instead of yourself and your obssessions. If you truly desire solitude and silence in which to cultivate an appropriate attitude, you must move your heart to be close to Him, listening intently and placing Him in the time He gave you, at His feet and close enough to His Heart to hear His longing for you.
That longing is reflected in reality itself. He will calm the tempests and provide for your most important needs. Don't forget to remember Him, and that He is as close as your next breath, and your next thought. As much as you like the things of the world because you are immsersed in them, you must make an equal amount of time available for Him. Remember you get only this one chance. Do not squander your time on your only fickle obssesions. He who made you can do all things, and transform you to one who is HIs lover, and He will embrace a warm and beating heart.
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I can't sleep tonight. It is another one of those nights it won't happen for me.
It is not unusual anymore, and it has been ongoing for a number of years. It concerns the Will of God and my own will. I have been praying for a young boy of eleven years who was suddenly confronted by a form of leukemia. He under went a bone marrow transplant and was pronounced free of the disease. However, it became necessary to undergo another transplant, but unfortunately after having neen irradiated to eliminate his own immune system, he was vulnerable to any pathogen in the environment capable of getting a foot hold in his young body. After the euphoria of hearing that he was free of leukemia, he came down with a virus that has halted most of his progress.
In this moment, the family, and the boy himself, would like to experience a full and complete healing, including the restoration of his sight, which became compromised after being put in a coma by the doctors; I don't pretend to understand that, but he eventually came out of the coma and seemed to be making great progress toward the desiired recovery until the vrus struck. Now the family is struggling to accept that their son is slipping away, with too many things wrong, and too few things moving in the right direction.
It is precisely this moment that every human being must come to in some way or another. One must do his best to accept God's Will even when it is contrary to every instinct of human existance entirely.
It came for me through the naive desire to bear the Stigmata or wounds of the Lord. I had been told that on a certain day, in a certain place, I would be granted my wish, but I received nothing but the humiliation I deserved. I was humbled and made to understand that I had become too attached to the consolations of the Lord and that I should endure their absence after having enjoyed them very much for many years. It made me as angry as any one can be, but it pointed out that the Will of God is more important than me.
In a way, I did receive them, but it was not in a bloody way, but in a way in which I must daily accept and surrender into His Will in everything, not simpply in them atter of Stigmata. The desire for Stigmata is to desire the passion of Jesus to glorify Him and to suffer with Him, the redemptive passion. One need not be stigmatized in order to be crucified in my life and living 24 hours a day. There is a paiin far deeper and indistinct which accompanies me now. I still miss the sweet consolations I used to enjoy. Occasionally I do briefly encounter the consolations once in a while, but the sweeter and deeper the consolations are, the deeper and more painful my suffering becomes, and I have had some serious moments to live through.
I only offer to suffer for someone else reluctantly, aware that I don't really want to feel the lance in my side, though I have without particularly enjoying the consolations; peace, yes, there was peace, I was not agitated or afraid, but spiritually something transpired I do not understand. Occassionally I feel pain in my hands feet and side, either all together at once, or in my hands or in my side, even my feet.
One of the elements of the passion is pain. I have been subjected to gout and to shingles and I think they were of equivalent intensity to a hole in the hand or side. But the apparent impending approach of homelessness because of a beurocratic foul-up, and then there was also the spectre of my brother and sister confronting the same thing, and it gutted me to pray so hard. Eventually, things resolved themselves.
In order for someone to encounter the stigmata, one must really desire it completely, otherwise it would be impossible to receive them. That is why it is possible for someone to experience them, and clearly anything is possible for God. To receive stigmata one must really desire that when Jesus at the same time desires that one should, and receive it as a gift of pure divine love.
Thus it is possible, but one should not trouble themselves about such a thing, and seek protetction for evil lest one become a victim of evil when in the moment of love one become the victim of grief.
I mention the stigmata because of the pain of losing someone small and dear to death. Obviously either complete healing or death are possible at the same time, but one desires a dear one to live and be happy and not be ground down in misery. To relinquish one so loved at such a tender age is an unspeakble sorrow. Part of the sorrow of death is that it is permanent. Saint Padre Pio underwent several events in which he experienced the passion Jesus in his soul and in his body, and it is difficult to know which hurt him more, the physical wounds bleeding and hurting, or the suffering in his soul which participated in the passion also.
It is certain that one can enter into the suffering of others. It is a great charity when one offers to exchange their peace and comfort for someone else's pain and sorrow, but it is not difficult. My advice to seekers of the Lord is not to worry in advance that one might be asked to enter into someone else's suffering, but to be of equal peace; to suffer in peace or not to suffer. To be of equal happiness opens the Heart of Jesus in a deep way to swallow one up in joy that one chose His love or one's personal comfort.
To be a contemplative is to be one who encounters God, and an intercessor is to be one whom Jesus can call upon to endure for someone else, enduring their misery so they may encounter peace and quiet in the Lord. There have been many who were intercessors and very happy at the same time, and the coexistance of love and pain is a sign of God's pleasure with a person. The gifts of St. Padre Pio rose from his love which was intensified by Jesus because of his love for others. The healing of penitents was due no doubt because of his deep and entire immersion in intercession for them. It was also the reason so many people turned to him for their physical and spiritual needs. St. Therese of Lisieux is another example of being totally surrendered to God and immersed in His Passion.
Every saint has encountered the moment of confrontation with the Will of God; every one of them gave God their will and went on to complete their lives in peace.
I don't have the right to demand anything from God. He has the right to make any demand He wants. We are too often of the opinion that He is mean, cruel and demanding. The cure for that is a long intense look at the cross He died on.
Punishment goes with sin, but He is forgiving and understands our pain a lot more than we imagine. When He was laying on the cross waiting to be nailed to it, He gave Himself up to all the pain we suffer in life. Some people He loves so much that they become capable of the impossibility we pray for, the miracles, the healings, the comforting and the unsurpassed peace that exists only in Himself united to us in our most absolutley genuine self of us.
The world is largely asleep, oblivious of all He tries to reveal to us. There will be a moment of revelation when the whole world will see the truth of who we are, and who He is. In that moment, the whole human race will be speechless, reduced to silence, stunned by His beauty and the depths of His love. In order to get the attention of every human being, He will reveal Himself such that we cannot ignore or be deceived by anything that could prevent us from seeing the truth. Stunned to silence by what is happening, silence will reign over the earth, and each will receive a correction appropriate to our need. We need to see Jesus, to see God and to know truth and experience love as He does.
This may be a cataclysmic moment, but those who have known Him will be silent, not stunned to silence like most. Anyone who has never tasted the consolationo f His love, WILL. Ir will coexist in the moment with all that is negative in life and creation, and the love of God which is everywhere.
As such, the moment will be speechless, for such incredibly intense moments prevent speech, even thought. The time to say "I love You" will come and linger like beautiful sunset.
All the pain we have suffered from whatever cause will be overcome in the moment, so that His love alone will be the focus of our being. Then we will see and understand that love is everything when there is nothing else but love.
Saints died to tell Him of their love, and glow with love like a beautiful dawn. We will then be allowed to see for ourselves what it is truly all about.
Mother Teresa responded; will you?
It may seem that God likes certain people a great deal more than others. But if you consider how you like certain people very much and detest others, you might be able to catch a glimpse of God you never imagined be fore. He loves us all in extraordinary ways, but I think it is true, that just as we form extraordinary relationships wiith some people as opposed to others, it is also true that God created certain people for a purpose and the friendship that blossomed between God and a human being was a natural consequence of of God's love.
With this is mind, you might meditate on what a holy life is, for a extraordinary person would love extraordinarilly. You might even come to realise that a deep friendship can spring up between ourselves and God if we put forth the effort.
If we put aside something we cherish deeply for the sake of prayer to express our loving attentiveness to God, He will respond in kind. There are occasions when we experiencr a trascendant peace suffused with love, it is for a reason. In the meditation about such matters we might begin to connect events with our own attitude toward God. The surest way to experience Him is to show that He is extraordinarilly loved by you.
For some, such moments when peace and love engulf us may be far and few between, but if we love what He shares with us, it is the beginning of a closer realstionship to God, whatever our life. The truth is, that everyone can have a closer relationship to God if we want it by setting aside our own concerns and pondering out role in what He might want of us.
Some are afraid to ask God for fear of being rejected or being asked to receiving a gift that involves pain or suffering of some sort. You might be one one of them, but if you come a little closer to Him in your desire to love Him, you might find that rather than being an impediment, it has become a blessing.
The feeling of being abandoned for some trespass is not easy to live with, or, frankly to get rid of. But it is a feelings I have consente...
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