DAY TWENTY-SEVEN
I am so grateful to St Teresa for making me understand that yes, you can choose the way of the Cross, and we must choose this path. For Gods love is not to be measured by a superficially easy and outwardly happy life in the conventional sense in which we use these words. Such a life is a calamity because it means we are totally unaware of a truer, deeper reality that makes the things of this world pale into insignificance. Conventional happiness is the measure of nothing but itself. What we should seek is the hard and narrow path that leads through suffering and service to a contentment that is nothing to do with this world. Bharti
PRAYER: As for me, given a choice
I would always choose the way of suffering.
Not just because it allows me to imitate the way of Jesus,
but because it brings many other blessings with it.
We cannot understand how suffering can be a grace
and how great a blessing it is
until we have left all things for the sake of Jesus.
For if we are attached to any one thing,
it is because we set a value on it.
It may be painful to surrender what we value,
but what greater loss, what greater blindness,
what greater calamity could there be
than to make much of what is nothing,
to cling to what has no value?
One day my Lord said to me:
Believe me, my daughter,
trials are the heaviest for those
my father loves best.
Trials are Gods measure of love,
How could I better demonstrate my love for you
than by desiring for you what I desired for myself?
MANTRA:Trials are a measure of Gods love.
EVENING PRAYER: In this quiet let me begin
to let go of the thousand tripial attachments
upon which I have come to depend,
out of which I have built my life,
and upon which I have rested my hopes.
Letting go of what I have come to value
will be painful.
But what greater loss could I know,
what greater blindness,
what greater calamity could there be,
than to make much of what is nothing,
to cling to what has no value?