A Quote for the Day

Those who love you unconditionally build up your store of graces and genuine love. Those who use you to their selfish ends siphon your energy to love unconditionally. The former are your true family; the latter are the people to reach out for your ministry.

Encountering oppositions and criticisms can mean that we have at last taken a stand worthy of our gifts. But what we need to be careful about in facing the strong winds in our lives is the temptation to forget that we stood strong and tall against the elements not on our own strength but through the grace of God that works in us. Forgetting this truth will make the triumph against the wind as meaningless as our fall before it. For either way does not make us closer to the God who loves us endlessly.

What the rich have difficulty of doing, but the poor are forced by life circumstances to do, is this--surrendering one's future into the hands of God, and not on one's own personal power and resources. This is something the rich finds very difficult to understand; but the poor understands very well. This is the gift of poverty, the reason why it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for the rich to enter the Kingdom. Still God provides the needed graces to both, enough to bring them salvation should they respond with love to God and surrender to His Will.

Because of the inherent need for every person to work for his own keep, we tend to think that the effort we give for the return we make constitutes rewards for our labors. We forget that everything we receive even through our own labor is a mere giftss, a blessing from God who provided for everything we need. All things that contribute to the receipt of that gift take specific roles in ensuring that the gift is received. Such efficiency of divine grace is wonderful to reflect upon, and thank God for.

Humility is knowing very well what we can and cannot do, without closing the possibility that with God's specific graces something more can be achieved. But all these shall be according to His Holy Will.

The excitements of life comes in its ups and downs, in the faces of people whom we love and love us back in return, in the kindness and joyful faces of strangers, in the graces that makes us understand our very lives deeply and broadly despite the many shadows that we have to pass through in this mortal journey. It is the adventure of a lifetime; an illumination that makes what can be a dreary existence more meaningful and worth dying for.