Lent 2016 : Day 22
Spiritual and Emotional turmoil: the glorious prize
In our daily lives and experiences we often face spiritual and emotional storms and we feel tossed about like small boat on a big lake. It may be distress, wariness, disappointment. While challenges are generally indispensible is our world, we tend to blame it on over involvement in church, spiritual or charity work/activities. Then you’d hear voices like, why are you doing this? It is time to face your life; things cannot continue like this.....
They’re challenges I have to contend with. The voices are always there, but now I am better ‘equipped’. In my struggle over the years, I have come to the conclusion that serving God, doing good, getting involved is a choice! It is a decision you have to take. It is a choice I have to make. And when you have made that choice, you go all out. There is no looking back (Genesis 19:26). But we do not expect the challenges of life to ‘vaporize’. No!
This season of lent is therefore a veritable time for us to learn how to utilize all occasions of great distress and disappointment as opportunities to prove our love to God. While it is impossible to change some situations, it is very possible to gain glorious merit by loving acceptance and subsequent offering of such to God in union with our savior’s suffering. Our Lord himself emphasised this point when He revealed to St. Gertrude the Great:
“I am better pleased with your good intensions which you offer when in a state of suffering, than with the sweetness of your devotion which gives pleasure to yourself; he who suffers patiently for love of me that which he is unable to cure, gains a glorious prize” (from Daily reflection of lives of Saint)
------ Sabastian
