Endurance
Whatever it takes
The great secret in prayer is simply to follow the attractions of the heart. We must go on in good faith and with pure intention to reach God, to love Him, and unite ourselves to Him. True love has little method.
St. Francis de Sales
I want to be where there are out and out pagans.
St. Francis Xavier
When we pray it is well to think that there is no one in the world but God.
St. Francis de Sales
We are not yet in our true country, and as gold is tried in the fire so must our souls be purified by temptation.
St. Thérèse of Lisieux
All quotes courtesy of pegasus.substack.com.
And this from a fellow Substack Writer factifaith.substack.com…
In one of the legends about him, there is a famous dialogue between St Francis and one of his disciples or Franciscan brothers, who asks him who is the greatest sinner in the world. St Francis said boldly “I am the greatest sinner in the world.“ The disciple murmured against him, “you cannot be serious, you work miracles, there are so many signs of God´s good blessing over your life and vocation. You must be saying this out of some affect, to appear holy or that is what you think you should say.” To this St Francis replied, “If the worst criminal in prison had been given the graces I had been given, I must think he would have made more out of them, or wasted less than I, and be more righteous than I. Thus, I truly believe I am the greatest sinner.”
Endure
There are so many times when our faith is tested by adversity, some of us less, some more than others. The suffering end of life was a mystery to me for decades. Then, like many others, the challenges brought by life and health, often took me to me knees. The person who could do whatever it took to get the physical job done, couldn’t. I learned it was a lesson. It was another gift from that neurological disorder of over twenty years. My temporal temple, my body of my soul, was breaking.
Would my faith hold steadfast?
Through thick and thin I clung to Him, even when I had weeks long arguments with Him about why I had to go through all this shite (Irish for ….)
He always brought me back. There were so many times when things failed with me and around me that I knew I had Him, as He had my back.
I clung to Him.
Which bring us around to what happens when your faith is constantly and severely tested and some, feel they lose their faith. What does one do?
You endure.
As St. Paul said, “I have finished the race…”
He did not say he won it. He said he finished it. And so, though life is a race, even more so today with its constant chaos sown by leaders of the world who should know better, the key is to finish. To finish in His grace, doing His will, spreading His love, being like Him Who created us in His image and likeness.
My two favorite quotes of Him from the Biblous (Greek for ‘The Book’, or the Bible) are…
“Be perfect just as your Father is perfect.”
And
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
Endure
I quote my Dad, from the book Faithful: Because of Love the True Story of the Survivors of Bataan…
“You know the human spirit is amazing. Here we are, little food, little water, torture with our brothers dying at the rate of four hundred a day from tropical diseases or torture. Conditions are miserable, beyond anything I’d ever been part of. Yet, the love these men showed one another, cared for one another, was so profound and powerful…. You know, if we were four legged animals we would have laid on our backs by the second day and raised all four paws to the sky and died. But not us humans. We persisted. We endured.”
Endure
So, despite it ‘all’ we persist. And the only thing we need to continue to persist is to…
Love God
Love every other single human being
Even in the deepest ‘wells’ or ‘dark dank tanks’ of life we must persist. We must realize like Francis, we too are ‘the world’s greatest sinner’. To compensate we must love constantly, ask His forgiveness and realize that he does indeed forgive us. Always has. Always will. Died and rose from the dead to prove it.
Then we must act in any way we can, whether it be within the jobs we do, or the time we spend helping those in greater need.
We do whatever we have to do…. To serve Him.
God bless us everyone.
Amen
clement
fishtownproductions.com… clementcharles.org… clementcharles.substacl.com
In a similar vein, I remember how profoundly it shook me when I realized that all of our church-talk about the "patience" of Job was misguided.
I don't believe the text of Job shows us a "patient" man (at least not in the sense of one who is quiescent in the face of suffering) but rather an enduring one...one who trusts and maintains a dogged allegiance to his God even when he felt rather mistreated and entitled to some sort of explanation.
Gratitude makes endurance bearable for me. Thanks for posting your thoughts.