Note to God

the “Tempter” came to him asking him to prove that he was worth being loved. The “Tempter” said to him: “Do something useful, like turning stones into bread. Do something sensational, like throwing yourself down from a high tower. Do something that brings you power, like paying me homage.” These three temptations were three ways to seduce Jesus into becoming a competitor for love. The world of the “Tempter” is precisely that world in which people compete for love through doing useful, sensational, and powerful things and so winning medals that gain them affection and admiration. Jesus, however, is very clear in his response: “I don’t have to prove that I am worthy of love. I am the Beloved of God, the One on whom God’s favor rests.” It was that victory over the “Tempter” that set Jesus free to choose for the compassionate life.

 is the contemplation of the daily Gospel. Each day of the year has its own Gospel passage. Each passage holds its own treasure for us. For me it has been of immense spiritual value to read each morning the story about Jesus that has been chosen for the day and to look at it and listen to it with my inner eyes and ears. I have discovered that when I do this over a long period of time, the life of Jesus becomes more and more alive in me and starts to guide me in my daily activities. Often I have found myself saying: “The Gospel that I read this morning was just what I needed today!” This was much more than a wonderful coincidence. What, in fact, was taking place was not that a Gospel text helped me with a concrete problem, but that the many Gospel passages that I had been contemplating were gradually giving me new eyes and new ears to see and hear what was happening in the world. It wasn’t that the Gospel proved useful for my many worries but that the Gospel proved the useless...

Jesus did not say: “Blessed are those who care for the poor,” but “Blessed are the poor.” Simple as this remark may seem, it offers the key to the kingdom. I want to help. I want to do something for people in need. I want to offer consolation to those who are in grief and alleviate the suffering of those who are in pain. There is obviously nothing wrong with that desire. It is a noble and grace-filled desire. But unless I realize that God’s blessing is coming to me from those I want to serve, my help will be short-lived, and soon I will be “burned out.” How is it possible to keep caring for the poor when the poor only get poorer? How is it possible to keep nursing the sick when they are not getting better? How can I keep consoling the dying when their deaths only bring me more grief? The answer is that they all hold a blessing for me. Ministry is, first of all, receiving God’s blessing from those to whom we minister. What is this blessing? It is a glimpse of the face of God. Seeing Go...

Why is it so difficult to be still and quiet and let God speak to me about the meaning of my life. Is it because I don’t trust God? Is it because I don’t know God? Is it because I wonder if God really is there for me? Is it because I am afraid of God? Is it because everything else is more real for me than God? Is it because, deep down, I do not believe that God cares what happens at the corner of Yonge and Bloor? Is it because I don't love God enough? I only love Him limitedly. I want my space, my time. It just shows I ultimately don't love him enough. I love him, but not enough. Just like Peter loved him, philia, not agape.  But Lord, I do desire to love you. My flesh is indeed weak O lord. Help my lack. Because I know, you love me. And will come down to me. Always. 

1. An important discipline in the life of the Spirit is spiritual reading. Through spiritual reading we have some say over what enters into our minds. Each day our society bombards us with a myriad of images and sounds. Driving down Yonge Street in downtown Toronto is like driving through a dictionary: each word demanding our attention in all sorts of sizes and colors and with all sorts of gestures and noises. The words yell and scream at us: “Eat me, drink me, buy me, hire me, look at me, talk with me, sleep with me”! Whether we ask for it or not is not the question; we simply cannot go far without being engulfed by words. Do  we want to let others decide what enters into our mind and determines our thoughts and feelings? Clearly we do not, but it requires real discipline to let God and not the world be the Lord of our mind. But that asks of us not just to be gentle as doves, but also cunning as serpents! Therefore spiritual reading is such a helpful discipline. Is there...

Do we have a clear goal in life? The athletes whose clear goal is the attainment of the Olympic gold are willing to let everything else become secondary. The way they eat, sleep, study, and train are all determined by that one clear goal. This is as true in the spiritual life as it is in the life of competitive sports. Without a clear goal, we will always be distracted and spend our energy on secondary things. “Keep your eye on the prize,” Martin Luther King said to his people. What is our prize? Is it the divine life, the eternal life, the life with and in God. Jesus proclaimed to us that goal, that heavenly prize How then do we keep our goal clear, how then do we fix our eyes on the prize? By the discipline of prayer: the discipline that helps us to bring God back again and again to the center of our life.

 know of few people who have seen as much suffering as the Dalai Lama. As the spiritual and political leader of Tibet he was driven from his own country and witnessed the systematic killing, torture, oppression, and expulsion of his people. Still, I know of few people who radiate so much peace and joy. The Dalai Lama’s generous and disarming laughter is free from any hatred or bitterness toward the Chinese who ravaged his land and murdered his people. He says: “They too are human beings who struggle to find happiness and deserve our compassion.” How is it possible that a man who has been subjected to such persecution is not filled with anger and a desire for revenge? When asked that question the Dalai Lama explains how, in his meditation, he allows all the suffering of his people and their oppressors to enter into the depth of his heart, and there to be transformed into compassion. What a spiritual challenge! While I anxiously wonder how to help the people in Bosnia, South Africa, ...

Too often we think or say: “I don’t want to bother my friends with my problems. They have enough problems themselves.” But the truth is that we honor our friends by entrusting our struggles to them. Don’t we ourselves say to our friends who have hidden their feelings of fear and shame from us: “Why didn’t you tell me, why did you keep it secret so long?” Obviously, not everyone can receive our hidden pains. But I believe that if we truly desire to grow in spiritual maturity, God will send us the friends we need. So much of our suffering arises not just out of our painful condition, but from our feeling of isolation in the midst of our pain. Many people who suffer immensely from addiction—be it addiction to alcohol, drugs, sex, or food—find their first real relief when they can share their pain with others and discover that they are truly heard. The many twelve-step programs are a powerful witness to the truth that sharing our pain is the beginning of healing. Here we can see how close ...

To really sacrifice for the sheep No glory at all All want to take the back seat. Who wants now to sit at the right and the left? You need to be crushed. The suffering servant.  It's burdensome because of sin. If everyone is a saint, everyone want to be a leader.  But we have to juggle your own sin, but the sin of others. We are dealing with the eternal yet are so undervalued. We aren't dealing with the material.  - there is no honor, power, glory. We do it because we love. We love in the love of God in us, through us, with us.  Only The love of God carries us through 

There are always sorrowful and joyful sides to the reality we live. And so we always have a choice to live the moment as a cause for resentment or as a cause for joy. It is in the choice that our true freedom lies, and that freedom is, in the final analysis, the freedom to love. It might be a good idea to ask ourselves how we develop our capacity to choose for joy. Maybe we could spend a moment at the end of each day and decide to remember that day—whatever may have happened—as a day to be grateful for. In so doing we increase our heart’s capacity to choose for joy. And as our hearts become more joyful, we will become, without any special effort, a source of joy for others. Just as sadness begets sadness, so joy begets joy.

Saint Bonaventure tells us that in the end we should not pray for light, but for “raging fire”. [17] He teaches that, “faith is in the intellect, in such a way as to provoke affection. In this sense, for example, the knowledge that Christ died for us does not remain knowledge, but necessarily becomes affection, love”. [18]

Are you following Jesus? I want you to look at yourself and ask that question. Are you a follower? Am I? Often, we are more wanderers than followers. I am speaking of myself as much as of you. We are people who run around a lot, do many things, meet many people, attend many events, read many books. We are very involved. We experience life as many, many things. We go here, we go there, we do this, we do that, we speak to him, we speak to her, we have this to do and that to do. Sometimes we wonder how we can do it all. If we sit down and think about it, we are often running from one emergency to another. We are so busy and so involved. Yet if we are asked what we are so busy with we don’t really know. People who wander from one thing to the other, feeling that they are lived more than they live, are very tired. Deeply tired. It is a problem for many people. It is not so much that we do many things but rather that we do many things while wondering whether anything is happening. seems as t...

To think of a small way or thing to agree with for both heart and head - it's a step in the right direction to cure that problem E.g. I hate my colleague - can think of a small thing of that colleague quality which u like - it can also be a step that may not even be related E.g. drink a sweet drink  - sth you like when you try to train to like your colleague  Eg. Soccer players also train arms even though they use their legs - about holistic training  

1. The heart is also the locus of sincerity, where deceit and disguise have no place. It usually indicates our true intentions, what we really think, believe and desire, the “secrets” that we tell no one: in a word, the naked truth about ourselves. It is the part of us that is neither appearance or illusion, but is instead authentic, real, entirely “who we are”. This interior reality of each person is frequently concealed behind a great deal of “foliage”, which makes it difficult for us not only to understand ourselves, but even more to know others: “The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse, who can understand it?” (Jer 17:9). We can understand, then, the advice of the Book of Proverbs: “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life; put away from you crooked speech” (4:23-24).  Mere appearances, dishonesty and deception harm and pervert the heart. Despite our every attempt to appear as something we are not, our heart is the ultimate judge, not...

Know which type of conversation you're in 1. Practical conversation: - what this is really about? How can I help? 2. Emotional conversation  - how do you feel? 3. Social conversation  - who we are? Identify and  match the conversation types to communicate well.  Ask: - what do you love about your job? - what was your high school like?

Fear can lead not only to sterility but also to a flight toward productivity. Here we have to make an important distinction between fruits and products. A call to live a fruitful life does not necessarily imply a call to be productive. A product is something we make. Certain concrete actions lead to a product that we can subsequently claim as our own. When we repeat these actions, the result is the same product, and if we repeat these actions over and over, we are soon considered very productive persons who do not waste their time. In our world, everything can become a product: not only cars, houses, books, and artifacts, but also influential friends, successful interactions, and important decisions. They all can become part of what we have “made,” what gives us a sense of being acceptable in the eyes of others. People are often introduced with emphasis on their productivity.  Productivity gives us a certain notoriety and helps take away our fear of being useless. But if we want to...

. They are fruits of the Spirit, such as: joy, peace, kindness, goodness, and gentleness. When we encounter any of these fruits, we always experience them as gifts. When, for instance, we enjoy a good atmosphere in the family, a peaceful mood among friends, or a spirit of cooperation and mutual support in the community, we intuitively know that we did not produce it. It cannot be made, imitated, or exported . To people who are jealous, and who would like to have our joy and peace, we cannot give a formula to produce it or a method to acquire it. It is always perceived as a gift, to which the only appropriate response is gratitude. Every time we experience real goodness or gentleness we know it is a gift. If we say: “Well, she gets paid to be nice to us,” or “He only says such friendly things because he wants something from us,” we can no longer receive that goodness as a gift. We grow from receiving and giving gifts. Life loses its dynamism and exuberance when everything that happ...

Don’t let me waste even one atom of my strength on petty material cares. Let me use and spend every minute and turn this into a fruitful day, one stone more in the foundations on which to build our so uncertain future

The word “ecstasy” helps us to understand more fully the joy that Jesus offers. The literal meaning of the word can help to guide our thinking about joy. “Ecstasy” comes from the Greek “ekstasis,” which in turn is derived from “ek,” meaning out, and “stasis,” a state of standstill. To be ecstatic literally means to be outside of a static place. Thus, those who live ecstatic lives are always moving away from rigidly fixed situations to exploring new, unmapped dimensions of reality. Here we see the essence of joy. Joy is always new. Whereas there can be old pain, old grief, and old sorrow, there can be no old joy. Old joy is not joy! Joy is always connected with movement, renewal, rebirth, change—in short, with life. Joy is essentially ecstatic since it moves out of the place of death, which is rigid and fixed, and into the place of life which is new and surprising. “God is God not of the dead but of the living” (Matthew 22:32). There is no tinge of death in God. God is pure life. Theref...

Productivity gives us a certain notoriety and helps take away our fear of being useless. But if we want to live as followers of Jesus, we must come to know that products, successes, and results often belong more to the house of fear than to the house of love. When fear dominates our lives, we worry about our value as persons and become easily preoccupied with products. I even wonder if our deep-seated fear of being sterile does not often motivate us to a frantic productivity. The emphasis on productivity is increasing constantly. Not only in the business and industrial world, but also in the worlds of sports and academics productivity has become the main concern. When productivity is our main way of overcoming self-doubt, we are extremely vulnerable to rejection and criticism and prone to inner anxiety and depression. Productivity can never give the deep sense of belonging we crave. The more we produce, the more we realize that successes and results cannot give us the experience of “at...

man or woman dedicates a good portion of their time, it is only natural that their desires will focus on drawing all the good possible from that profession, filling it with the newness of Christ, finding God in that service done with as much care as possible. Therefore they will often be at the forefront of their professional field, pointing to the future, urged forward by the creativity of the Holy Spirit.

Once again I insist that the vocation to Opus Dei is a contemplative vocation, of souls who are in the middle of the street out of love for Christ, making the street their cell, but in a continuous dialogue with God.”

on the vocation to the Work, points out that the calling of the supernumeraries “cannot be limited to living some practices of piety, attending some means of formation and participating in some apostolic activity. Rather, it encompasses your whole life, because everything in your life can be an encounter with God and a form of apostolate. To do Opus Dei is to do it in our own lives and, through the communion of saints, to cooperate in carrying it out throughout the world. Or, as our founder reminded us in a graphic phrase, to do Opus Dei by each one being Opus Dei.