on growing

Making time for God regularly is a fundamental element for spiritual growth; it will be the Lord himself who gives us the taste for his mysteries, his words, his presence and action, for feeling how beautiful it is when God speaks with us; he will enable us to understand more deeply what he expects of me. Pope Benedict XVI

Making time
Our lives are constantly on the go. From one task to another. This is why we need to make time for God.

Regularly
It's not only a spur of the moment time. It's a carved out time for us to participate in His time.

Through time with God we learned a little bit more each time about Him.
His mysteries
His words
His presence
His action
It's like dating a person. We try to seek what's on the mind of God right at this moment. We try to understand why He does what He does.

But most importantly:
Understanding what He expects of myself
To know what is required for me to grow in Him
To know what habits needed to be changed
To understand the task that I have to do today so that His will may be done in our community.

O God come to my assistance

O God, come to my assistance, O Lord, make haste to help me - Psalm 70:1

We must continuously pray this verse both in adversity
that we may be delivered,
and in prosperity that we may be preserved,
and not puffed up.
St. John Cassian

taken from: wordofgodeveryday.com

Let us pray this, every single time temptation come to our lives. Why?
Because we know that He will come to our aid, when we need it the most.
Every single time blessings is here. Why?
Because we know our pride. We know that we think the blessings came from our own self, and not from Him. Praying this word, reminds us to be delivered from pride. The source of all sins.

"Set me as a seal on your heart"

From today's office of reading:

That is why he says: ‘Set me as a seal on your heart.’ As though to say: Love me, as I love you; have me in your mind, in your memory, in your desire; in your sighing, your groaning, your weeping. Remember, man, in what state I fashioned you, how far I preferred you before the rest of creatures, the dignity with which I ennobled you; how I crowned you with glory and honour, made you a little less than the angels, and subjected all things under your feet. Remember not only the great things I did for you, but what harsh indignities I bore on your behalf; and see if you are not acting wickedly against me, if you do not love me. For who loves you as I love you? Who created you, if not I? Who redeemed you, if not I?

Baldwin of Canterbury: treatise 10 

Remember me
re-member. Let us rejoined ourselves again to Him. To become, once again, a member of His body.

For who loves you as I love you? Who created you, if not I? Who redeemed you, if not I?
nobody. nobody. nobody. But you O Lord.

Here is a prayer, that ends the treatise that Baldwin of Canterbury wrote:

Lord, take away from me the heart of stone, a heart shrunken and uncircumcised — take it away and give me a new heart, a heart of flesh, a clean heart. You cleanse our heart and love the heart that is clean — possess my heart and dwell in it, both holding it and filling it. You surpass what is highest in me, and yet are within my inmost self! Pattern of beauty and seal of holiness, mould my heart in your likeness: mould my heart under your mercy, God of my heart and God my portion for ever. Amen.

Give me a new heart O Lord. A heart that loves like You do. Amen.

Providential Hands of God

Let us allow ourselves to be guided, let us allow Providence to decide what to do with us.
Pope Benedict XVI, May 18, 2008

Providence
It comes from the latin word pro + videre. Pro means forward. Videre is to see. So, literally, it means to see forward. Let the hands of God be the one who see our future. Not ourselves. Not our might. But God's hand.

We are God's temple

For God to dwell in us, we need to listen to him; we must allow his Word to challenge us every day, meditating upon it in our hearts after the example of Mary (cf. Lk 2:51). In this way we grow in friendship with him, we learn to understand what he expects from us and we are encouraged to make him known to others.
Pope Benedict XVI, March 25, 2012

God dwell in us
St Paul once said, "Do you not know that your body is a temple of the holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?"
We are not our own. We moved because God moved us first. We loved because God loved us first.

Allowing Him to challenge us
Let us meditate on verses that we encounter today. Mine would be, "There is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents."

In this verse I see the God who wants me to be the repentant sinner. I know that I am not perfect. I need to seek His will through out my day to day mundanity. That is the way we grow in friendship with Christ. We learn to understand God's quirk. We know what his likes (virtues) and dislikes (sins). And knowing means loving. If we have the best person in the world to be in our hearts, why wouldn't we want to share it with others?

Transfiguration

To look upon the face of Christ, to recognize its mystery
amid the daily events and the sufferings of his human life,
and then to grasp the divine splendor revealed in the Risen Lord,
seated in glory at the right hand of the Father;
this is the task of every follower of Christ.
St. Alphonsus Liguori

Humanity and divinity
"To err is human. To forgive, divine," says Alexander Pope. To celebrate our imperfections and to look forward to our perfections. That's why we are here on earth. Here is our task today. To know God and to know ourselves.

If my tongue cannot say that I love You

I love You, O my God,
and my only desire is to love You
until the last breath of my life.
I love You, O my infinitely lovable God,
and I would rather die loving You,
than live without loving You.
I love You, Lord
and the only grace I ask is to love You eternally…
My God, if my tongue cannot say in every moment that I love You,
I want my heart to repeat it to You as often as I draw breath.
Prayer of St. John Vianney

I want my heart to repeat it to You as often as I draw breath.
breathing in. breathing out. I love You Lord. Let it be reflected on our actions through out today.

Your grace is sufficient

Therefore, that I might not become too elated, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, an angel of Satan, to beat me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I begged the Lord about this, that it might leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” I will rather boast most gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me. Therefore, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong.
2 Cor 12:7-10

That I might not be too elated
During those moments of glory, how many times do we have our pride? It is so easy. We can say: that's all me. I did all the hard work. I deserved the honor. Yet, we not that's not true. We didn't built the crown ourselves. It's all team work.

His grace is enough
He gives. He takes away. It is all grace. Is that sufficient? It is more than what we can wish for.

Boast of my weakness
Imperfections is the mark of a fallen humanity. Yet, God has redeemed the world. Only through our acknowledgement. That I am weak. I am poor. I am desolate. There. We will find God in the midst of our life. When we know that all good things come from the above.

A clay in the hand of a potter

This word came to Jeremiah from the LORD:
Rise up, be off to the potter's house;
there I will give you my message.
I went down to the potter's house and there he was,
working at the wheel.
Whenever the object of clay which he was making
turned out badly in his hand,
he tried again,
making of the clay another object of whatever sort he pleased.
Then the word of the LORD came to me:
Can I not do to you, house of Israel,
as this potter has done' says the LORD.
Indeed, like clay in the hand of the potter,
so are you in my hand, house of Israel.

he tried again
Whenever we failed, God did not stop. He keeps on trying. He still knocks at the door of our heart. He wants us to grow. To become "another object of whatever sort he pleased."

Whatever sort he pleased
Who am I? I am His. What is pleasing to God, may not be pleasing to me yet. But it will be. For who am I to question His judgment? Who am I to complain of all the sufferings and trials that I have to endure? Who am I to curse the darkness? Should I light one candle instead?

Prayer

Prayer as a way of “accustoming” oneself to being with God brings into being men and women who are not motivated by selfishness, by the desire to possess or by the thirst for power, but by gratuitousness, by the desire to love, by the thirst to serve, in other words who are motivated by God; and only in this way is it possible to bring light to the darkness of the world.
Benedict XVI, June 20, 2012

Culture shock
When we pray, we feel this 4 stages of culture shock: Honeymoon, Negotiation, Adjustment, Mastery and the interdependence. We try to adjust our worldly cultural value, with the heavenly one. At first, we feel great. We love the peace and joy that it brings. After some time, we realize that the worldly culture differ with the heavenly one. We feel anxious, will this new culture bring us true and lasting peace? After a while we adjust. We know that our goal is to be in heaven. We want to leave behind our worldly desire and embrace God's way of living. Afterwards, we would master the host culture. I believe this occur only after we spend years and years of prayer and discipline. It doesn't come easily. But when it comes, we know that it's due to the grace of God.

Here is prayer. We learn to pray in order to communicate with God. We would like to give thanks. We would want to love. We want to serve the Lord who created us in the first place. Truly, through these 4 steps will we bring light into the darkness of the world. Let us pray that He will guide us each step of the way.