Reflect: Discouragement knocks us down. It takes away our motivation, it makes us feel unworthy or incapable. Discouragement prevents us from seeing the truth about ourselves, and our situation. Discouragement is not from God. The voice of the enemy discourages, while the voice of God encourages. When you feel discouraged, reject the devil’s lies, and give your frustrations to God, asking Him to show you the truth.
Share: Being honest about our discouragements can be difficult. Be bold today, and share your discouragement with another person. Allow them to encourage you. When someone shares their discouragements with you, remind them of the truth about who they are in God’s eyes.
Pray: Pray the Litany of Trust in the morning and at night. Download it here.
Watch the video featuring Sr. Ana Chiara, DLJC:
Reflect: St. Pio of Pietrelcina (Padre Pio) used to share a story about a mother embroidering a quilt. Next to her, on a small stool, was her little son. As the son looked up at his mother’s embroidery, all he could see was the underside, and he said to her, “Mama, what an ugly picture! There are strings going every-which-way and it doesn’t look like anything!” The mother didn’t speak, but lowered her embroidery so that her son could the right side of the quilt. He looked at it with amazement, because he could now see how each thread had a specific place and purpose, to create a beautiful picture.
Reflect: “It was Christ who chose the stable to be born in and who continues to choose unlikely places. In each of us, just beyond the noise of our outward life, there is some place of silence and darkness, an emptiness where, if we have courage enough, we are alone with ourselves.” (Caryll Houselander) In the unlikely stable of our hearts, in our waywardness and doubt, He longs to say: I am here and I love you!
Reflect: We live in a world that wants to complete eradicate suffering because it sees no purpose or value. But as followers of Jesus, who himself suffered the torture of the passion and even death, we have the gift of a different perspective. The love that Jesus shows us is not only in the ultimate sacrifice and gift of his life that he offers, but in the constancy of his remaining in suffering with us. He suffers when we suffer and when we recognize that and allow him to accompany us in the pain, it consoles his heart and our own as well. It doesn’t mean that suffering disappears or goes away, but his consolation is solace in the midst of it. I once heard the account of a group of women who were martyred while holding their babies and was asked to consider what the deepest reality was for the children. Was it that they were being put to death or that they were being held by their mothers? Because of their age, they likely didn’t understand what was going on, but the fact that they were being held was the reality about which they were most aware. In moments of suffering, let us allow ourselves to be with Jesus and held by the Father so that we would embrace suffering not as a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived and a means to deeper intimacy with the Lord.
Reflect: Have you ever felt God was calling you to something, but felt resistant or hesitant or maybe you refused God entirely? Maybe you felt you did not have what it takes? We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses who have experienced the same thing; ordinary men and women God has called to the extraordinary because God promised to be with them, as he told Moses, “I will be with you.”