Note to God

Like attracts like Thoughts emit frequency that attracts. You get what you want when you consistently think about the thought. You keep thinking how bad it is, you will attract the bad things.  The problem is you focus on things you don't want.  You keep thinking I won't be late, you will attract lateness.  When you focus on things with passion, on what you do want, you will get what you want.  You attract the thoughts you think. You draw everything to yourself, the people, the job, the community, like magnet. It's not wishful thinking, but a deeper understanding. An affirmative thought is a hundred times more powerful. Be aware of your thoughts, choose your thoughts carefully, you are the sculptor with your thoughts. We think our thoughts are auto pilot, we can't control it. We have 6000 thoughts a day. We can't control thoughts but thoughts cause your feelings. Our feelings signal our thoughts. Good feeling signals that the Thought is good. The fruits of the Spiri...

Negative - why am I like that? Why did I respond this way? Positive - what can I do better?

My children, our Father says, don't expect people to applaud your work. Seek only to please God, through your fidelity to the Magisterium of the Church, through the witness of your conscience in your upright behaviour, and through your humble, hidden, effective service to God, to the Church, to all souls. Don't even be surprised if other people and institutions who also work for Christ sometimes misunderstand you. Seek only God's glory, and while always loving everyone, don't worry if others don't understand. Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful. This is how we will always remain strong, calm, and cheerful; and we will never cease to be sowers of peace and joy. If we were ever to lose our peace and calm, even for a moment, in the face of external misunderstandings, then it would indicate that there was still room for improvement as regards the puri...

What a difference there is between the young, impetuous, intransigent John, and the aged Apostle who repeatedly reminded his disciples at Ephesus and Patmos about the supreme command of charity! Divine grace and suffering had combined to purify his youthful ambition. His eagerness had become more serene, more understanding and charitable. This is what we learn from the life of the Apostle John. He burst out with that impetuous response to Jesus' question - possumus! But later on, once he had come to understand Jesus' words in all their depth, he spent his whole life serving God. By the grace of God, the great love that burned within his heart became more ardent and more supernatural

Along the road of our life, which is a journey of love, we are often confronted with the stark reality of our weakness. The path to God is not a succession of effortless steps, nor is it ordinarily a straight line of uniform progress. To scale a mountain, a straight line is not usually the best route. In the interior life, God often prefers to lead souls along winding paths - trails that lead up and down, and at times even seem to go backwards, although in reality they are taking us nearer the summit. So we shouldn't be surprised to find, with the passing years, that defects we thought we had overcome start cropping up again, or that there are new fronts to fight on.

What is peace? Peace is something closely related to war. It is a consequence of victory; peace demands a continual struggle on my part Without struggle I will never have peace. The peace that Christ offers us is not just a comfortable and selfish feeling of tranquillity, but is rather the result of sacrifice and generosity . It is not the cowardly sense of calm we might achieve by avoiding the demands of our personal struggle or running away from the challenges of our surroundings. Let's remember that Christ says: I have come to bring a sword, not peace . And our Father comments: Few people understand that war is a necessary means to peace. First, we must wage war on ourselves; we each need to wage a personal battle against our own passions. Isn't that your experience, your Christian struggle, which consists in overcoming yourselves and preparing to be people who serve? If we want to attain peace, we need to be courageous in the ascetical struggle . What a taste of gall and v...

the word abandonment in an active as well as in a passive sense, to imply not only a generous acceptance of all that the divine will allows to happen to us, but also a prompt and generous performance of all that the divine will clearly asks of us. What we would emphasize is that it is the will of God which gives its value to what we do. For love is the conformity of our will to the will of God, and love eventually is all that matters

A very high degree of love of God is quite compatible with an absence of any feeling of emotion, and even with the presence of a feeling of distaste for the service of God. We have only to remember our Lord’s prayer in the Agony at Gethsemani to realize that. In fact, if one is going to achieve the heights of the spiritual life, it is necessary to pass through a stage where one’s apparent spiritual activity is reduced to a dry act of willingness to conform one’s self to God’s Will, in the darkness of a sheer decision to believe in God without light of any sort. This does not mean that the emotions have not their part to play in the spiritual life. On the contrary, they can be a most effective aid to the real agent, which is the will working by faith. - Eugene Boylan, This Tremendous Lover

The human person must indeed work and be involved in domestic and professional occupations, but first and foremost he or she needs God, who is the inner light of Love and Truth. Without love, even the most important activities lose their value and give no joy. Without a deeper meaning, all our activities are reduced to sterile and unorganized activism . And who but Christ can give us Love and Truth? The change of attitude that Jesus asked of Martha – and of each one of us – is only possible through love. It is not simply the effort to put more attention or care into our daily tasks. Rather, it is realizing as we work that God is looking at us with love . Then our work becomes an act of constant love, a continuous “I love you” that goes beyond what we can say with our lips or our thoughts. “Words are not needed, because the tongue cannot express itself. The intellect grows calm. One does not reason; one looks! And the soul breaks out once more into song, a new song, because it feels and...

THERE is a phenomenon in the natural order which illustrates a great principle of the supernatural order: It is the structure and the growth of crystals. Each crystalline substance has its own characteristic shape; wherever complete crystals occur, not only the whole crystal, but also each unit of it, has that particular shape. If a crystal be suspended in a suitable solution of the substance of which it is composed—the “mother liquor” as it is called—that crystal will grow by drawing to itself material from the solution, forming it to its own image and likeness, and then uniting it to itself, yet so that the new and greater unity is an exact replica of the original nucleus and of each of the component units.  So it is with Christ. Lifted up on the cross, He draws all things to Himself; ... If Christ be the crystal, Mary is the mother liquor, at least insofar as all comes to us through her, and through her we all go to Christ. There is no more certain or more easy way of being unit...

Common difficulties to prayer 1. Disctracton  -prayer demands concentration and discipline - Loss of sense of vigilance - prayer is about the expectancy of the coming of Christ. And we need to always do the lord's will daily and to have that spirit of vigilance that Christ is coming, hence, to pray till the day of the Lord comes. - we have forgotten to await the coming of the lord. That's why the prayer life diminishes. The heart no longer becomes vigilant 2. Period of dryness, desolation and the lack of perseverance  3. Acedia, or sloth - not wanting to pray due to spiritual fatigue, leading to abandonment of prayer

My mother maintained the sort of parental mind-set that I now recognize as brilliant and nearly impossible to emulate—a kind of unflappable Zen neutrality. I had friends whose mothers rode their highs and lows as if they were their own, and I knew plenty of other kids whose parents were too overwhelmed by their own challenges to be much of a presence at all. My mom was simply even-keeled. She wasn’t quick to judge and she wasn’t quick to meddle. Instead, she monitored our moods and bore benevolent witness to whatever travails or triumphs a day might bring. When things were bad, she gave us only a small amount of pity. When we’d done something great, we received just enough praise to know she was happy with us, but never so much that it became the reason we did what we did.  Advice, when she offered it, tended to be of the hard-boiled and pragmatic variety. “You don’t have to like your teacher,” she told me one day after I came home spewing complaints. “But that woman’s got the kind...

it more difficult to be “naturally normal” because this implies the acquisition of the different ethical habits, or virtues (such as prudence, justice, etc.) and at least some of the scientific, artistic or technical habits. It is still more difficult to incorporate the theological “supernatural” virtues of faith, hope, and love, and even more arduous to do this in a harmonic and simple manner in the everyday, ordinary life. The restoration of nature through virtue leads immediately to its perfection, which is received through the supernatural. Therefore, the addition of the supernatural in an ordinary life of a virtuous person bestows an incredible “naturalness” which transforms one into a wonderfully normal person. In other words, to be wonderfully normal requires a lot of personal effort and, no less, the grace of God. And this was the “essential” in the lives of Paquita and Tomás, with an important nuance: the manner in which they translated this wonderful naturalness to their marr...

El Greco’s most famous painting of Christ carrying the cross, a postcard she bought just after their first seeing the painting with their father. He had drawn their attention to the title, saying, “Look how beautiful! The painting isn’t called ‘Christ Carrying the Cross’; it’s called ‘Christ Embracing the Cross.’ Do you get this? Christ embraces the cross. . . .”

Wisdom brings peace. We will be helped to bring joy wherever we go, and to find the right word to reconcile those who are at odds with one another. Thus does this gift tie in with the beatitude: Blessed are the peacemakers. Those who have peace in themselves can bring peace to others. This peace which the world cannot give results from seeing all within the providential plan of God, who never for a moment forgets his children.

I've heard one of my friend sharing: I don't want to have kids when I marry. I don't feel like having kids.  This thought is really unheard of in the early centuries of humanity. It stems from the mindset that I can choose what I want, and not think about anyone else.  The basis of having children, apart from it being a fruit of love, total self giving love, made flesh, is that it is sanctified. For God became man by being a babe. He became one of us, through the love of parents. He did not appear, but he came from a family. Jesus Christ blessed with his entire being by starting the cycle of life, through the love of his father and mother, in the purest way possible, that God who saw it, entrusted His child within. Why did God enter Earth through that? Because marriage is holy. And the fruit of marriage is God, because the fruit of marriage is love. To say you don't want to have kid is saying you don't want God. And that's the reality of it. If Mary said No, I d...

As St John of the Cross said, where there is no love, put in love and there you will find love.

God desires obedience compared to sacrifice. We tend to do a thousand of difficult things except the difficult thing that Our Lord asked.  God sees things not as man see C.f. choosing David instead of the 1st son of Jesse, who looked the part of a leader. God sees not the appearance but man's heart.

“spiritual DNA”. They remind us of who we are, what we are made for, what we aspire to. The core of our “spiritual DNA” is the commandment to love one another, but with a love whose measure we can only grasp by looking at Christ. We have to realize that the overriding source of our joy, the reason for our happiness, is God’s love for us, which is not just any love . “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you.” That is, Christ loves us. What He says to the apostles is meant for all of us, and that is why He wanted it to be in the Gospel. Our Lord loves us with the same love—nothing less—as that with which God the Father loves Christ. "He loves me and gave Himself up for me". We were like a seed incapable of opening itself, incapable of dying in order to give way to the shoot that will never cease growing and strengthening , with a life that will always remain. Only in Christ can we learn what it means to love and to love one another, because in him we have received a lig...

We can never go too far in our self-giving: ours is poor coin to pay God back what we owe him in justice. This consideration will lead us to get rid of any false compassion for ourselves when the fulfilment of our duties requires sacrifice.

An award winning movie, True story, featuring 3 African American women who worked at NASA in the 1930s.  They had to deal with racial and gender discrimination. They were really brilliant in the field of math, but were merely regarded as human computers churning data and ensuring accuracy.    During that period, there was a space race to launch the first human into space and bring them back, what was called Project Mercury.  One of the African American woman, called Katherine Johnson, was brilliant in Analytical Geometry, was recruited from the human comp lab to the space discovery lab. But she was the only black female. And the discrimination was bad. She had no toilet in that building.  Her toilet, which they called the coloured toilet, was back at her old dungeon office 2km away. Yet, even going to the toilet, she would bring her stack of data to validate in the toilet so as not to waste time. And her boss was like, what is going on, why is she always missing...

Love for God doesn’t eliminate our human desires – for companionship, for the future, for noble human goals – but rather purifies them and unites them in a call to intimacy with God

the worst enemy of a rock is not a pickaxe or any other such implement, no matter how sharp it is. No, its worst enemy is the constant flow of water which drop by drop enters the crevices until it ruins the rock’s structure. The greatest danger for a Christian is to underestimate the importance of fighting skirmishes which... can, little by little, leave him soft and weak (J. Escrivá, Christ is passing by, 77).

Rather than self-mastery, we are seeking to love Our Lord, removing every barrier which causes a difficulty in the growth of our friendship with him and therefore separates us from others. Love gives us an opportunity to make many acts of contrition for failures, and acts of thanksgiving for the successes we manage to achieve.

Sometimes, in order not to appear out of step, one easily begins not to be consistent with one’s principles. One falls into the temptation of leaning to the side from which approving smiles and handshakes more readily come, or at least in the direction of mediocrity. This is what happened to the Pharisees. Vanity and cowardice were what led them away from God That is what led them to seek another theatre for their struggles, and is what lost them: because once you begin to try pleasing your spectators, the battles you fight are the ones they want to see (St John Chrysostom, o.c., 72). On the contrary, those who truly seek Christ have to accept that their conduct will be unpopular and often criticised, particularly if they live in an environment that is not very Christian. It's true.. how we are tempted not to follow the custom of not eating meat or chicken on Fridays when our friends are eating at a restaurant that only has meat.. The first thing we have to do is to please Christ

The following could be matter for the particular examination: presence of God at work, in family life, while walking along the street; being more alert in discovering the presence of tabernacles and greeting Our Lord with an aspiration, perhaps even though we cannot visit him at that moment; care of punctuality right from the time of getting up in the morning, on starting the prayer, at Holy Mass; having patience with ourselves, with the defects of our fellow workers or in the family; rooting out any tendency to gossip and trying to see that nobody gossips in our company; brusqueness in dealing with others; indifference to our neighbour’s needs; developing the virtue of being thankful so that we can express gratitude even for small favours and services in our daily life; being more ordered in our use of time, with our books and work materials; our relationship with our Guardian Angel. One topic for particular examination that can leave a deep impression on our soul if we work at it wil...

In knowing Christ, we know perfection in love.

never wanted to be in the limelight, or to stand out in any way. Nor did she want her children to be at all attention-seeking. When Concha went to Rome to continue her Opus Dei studies, her mother advised, “Always be just one more.”

On the story of a loving married couple who has a child together, the mum, an actress, and the dad, a theatre director. And after years of marriage, the wife demands for a divorce. Why? 1. The wife was not being heard. She felt she lost her persona, and she was just part of her husband's. Her identity was lost, her taste, her preferences, what she wanted was lost. She had forgotten what her taste in design was. She moved to her husband in NY, stayed in his house. In her eyes, she got “smaller” with Charlie, who was unsupportive of her wants, becoming more of an extension of him than a person for herself. She wanted something of her own and not a temporary pipe dream.  "All the problems were there in the beginning…I didn’t come alive for myself I was just feeding his aliveness….He didn’t see me as something separate from himself.” She was from LA. She wanted to go back to LA as a family, were her family is, she tried to tell her husband, it was "discussed" but turned ...