Yes, failure is painful, but without pain there is no living in love. So then, go through the arches of Christ’s pain and enter into the joy of his heart. In the process, there will be many times when you fail. You will fall flat on your face- even as he did on the way to the cross. Alleluia!
Grace in Every Season (March 27)
Your poverty which makes you only and always such a little child your total poverty: of goods, of attachments, of ideas, of affections. To be poor means precisely to possess this nothingness. It is this nothingness which attracts God’s pleasure and which is alone capable of receiving it.
Blue Book #64 h
The process of being detached from ourselves and the world around us can often be experienced by us as failure. We may be even be feeling right now like we have failed at Lent. Yet if we examine it carefully, we may see that it was our own wishes and desires that we were aiming to attain. That if we truly entrust our entire lives to Him, that we can’t fail. It may not look like what we had planned, but He can use it all and make good out of it. To bring us graces that we could never imagine. But we need to do our part… we need to commit ourselves to Him.
In today’s Gospel Jesus says “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” He says ‘Whoever follows me’, He doesn’t tells us to just hang in there that everything will eventually work out, and just think good thoughts…or whatever other platitudes our society has come up with to take His place. He tells us what WE must do… Follow Him!