This is inspiring and very encouraging! 🙂

from Searching for and Maintaining Peace

A Small Treatise on Peace of Heart

by Father Jacques Philippeclassic_vintage_blessed_virgin_mary_mother_of_god_poster-rf9cb4ddf3f8a4bbf8be1d6ea26da5104_wp428_8byvr_512

Don’t Let Your Apparent Lukewarmness Upset You

Don’t allow yourself to become disheartened or discouraged if it appears that you are making no progress, if you are fainthearted and lukewarm, if you should see that you are still subject to natural affections, thoughts of pride and sad feelings. Simply strive to forget all these things and turn your mind toward God, standing before Him in the quiet and continuous desire that He make of you and in you His holy pleasure. Aim only at forgetting yourself and at walking before Him in the midst of your poverty, without ever looking at yourself…As long as you are concerned with the capriciousness of nature, you will be busy with yourself and, as long as you are busy with yourself, you will not make much progress on the way to perfection. These capricious movements will stop only when you hold them in contempt and forget them. Besides, I assure you that they are of no importance nor of any consequence, don’t pay any attention to them, only look at God and this with a pure and simple faith.

Don’t Worry About Your Falls

Always forget the past and never worry about your falls, many as they may be. So long as you get back on your feet, no harm will have been done; whereas, a great deal of harm will occur if you lose heart of if you berate yourself too much for your failures. Do everything with the greatest possible calm and serenity and out of the greatest, purest and holiest love of Jesus and Mary.

Patience

One of the principal obstacles one encounters on the way to perfection is the precipitous and impatient desire to progress and to possess those virtues that we feel we don’t have. On the contrary, the true means of solidly advancing, and with giant steps, is to be patient and to calm and pacify these anxieties….Don’t get ahead of your guide for fear of getting lost and straying from the path that He indicates, because if you do, instead of arriving safe and sound, you will fall into a pit. Your guide is the Holy Spirit. By your struggles and worries, by your anxiety and haste, you overtake Him with the pretense of moving more quickly. And then what happens? You stray from the path and find yourself on terrain that is harder and rougher and, far from advancing, you go backwards; at a minimum, you waste your time.

Let the Spirit of God Act

When it pleased God to create the universe, He worked with nothing, and look at the beautiful things He made! In the same way, if He wants to work in us to accomplish things infinitely beyond all the natural beauties which came from His hands, He doesn’t need our becoming so agitated to help Him…Rather, let Him work by Himself; He likes to work with nothingness. Let us stay peacefully and quietly before Him and simply follow the changes that He produces….Let us then keep our souls at peace and our spiritual forces at rest before Him, while awaiting every motion and sign of life from Him alone. And let us endeavor not to move, will or live, except in God and through the Spirit of God. It is necessary to forget oneself and continually direct one’s soul toward God and leave it calmly and peacefully before Him.