The Lord Delights in YOU!

 

“The Lord takes delight in His people.” –Psalm 149:4

Let those words sink in: “The Lord takes delight in His people.” The Lord takes delight in YOU!

You know what He’s delighted with? All the goodness in your heart. He delights in your good intentions and aspirations. He delights in your hard work, how you care for your family and reach out to your friends. He delights in your humble works of service and your random acts of kindness. He delights in how you want to love Him and others a little better each day. Maybe you’ve had a conversion of heart and have abandoned your old, hurtful ways of doing things. God delights in your steps toward Him!

He created you and He knows all about you. He knows how much you want to follow Him and how hard you are on yourself when your efforts fall short. He knows your history, both the good and the bad, and He loves you with all of it. Are you spending time and energy ruminating about past sins? If you’ve already asked God to forgive you, why are you still hanging onto them? He doesn’t think about them anymore.

“As far as the east is from the west,
    so far has He removed our transgressions from us.” –Psalm 103:12

 

God wants you to recognize your own goodness! When you see that you’re good, you’ll want Him to fill you with more of His love so that you can love Him and others even more. Satan, on the other hand, wants you to focus only on your sins. If you believe his lie that you’re bad, you’ll mistakenly think that you’re unworthy of God’s love and incapable of loving others, and that God doesn’t want you near Him. Don’t listen to those lies! Don’t let Satan drag you down. Resolve every day to love God and to shower yourself and the people around you with the love He puts in your heart. Remind yourself every day that He has promised you eternal life!  

God loves you and delights in you! There is no limit to His love and forgiveness. Christ said it and He proves it when He makes Himself present to us in the sacraments of Reconciliation and Eucharist. Let all these thoughts fill you with joy, and then take this joy with you as you show the world God’s boundless love.

“Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good; His love endures forever.”  --Psalm 107:1

 

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Detachment and Freedom

The words that kept coming up this week were ‘detachment’ and ‘freedom.’ The former leads to the latter. Feel the freedom in this prayer:

“Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty,

my memory, my understanding, and my entire will,

all that I have and possess.

You have given all to me. To You, Lord, I return it.

All is Yours; dispose of it wholly according to Your will.

Give me Your love and Your grace, for this is sufficient for me.”

--Suscipe Prayer, St. Ignatius of Loyola

 In this prayer, we humbly detach ourselves from everything except God Himself: our material goods, interior blessings, and all the people we know and love. We recognize that all of it has been given to us by God; we don’t claim anything as our own. Instead, we open our hands and invite the Lord to take everything back.

We ask God to take from us anything that gets between us and Him, or gets in the way of how we love Him and each other. It encourages us to determine which habits, attitudes, and practices we need to detach ourselves from in order to make room in our hearts for His love and grace.

Offering everything back to God frees us from emotional baggage like greed, worry, and arrogance. For example, being detached from our material possessions allows us to freely share more of what we have with others. Ironically, yesterday morning I noticed that someone had stolen a flowerpot off our front porch. My heart sank: I was disappointed that I had one less flowerpot and also that someone felt the need to take it. And so I had to remind myself to stay detached: in this case, to acknowledge my disappointment, pray for the perpetrator, notice that I felt thankful that the other flowerpots and decorations were left untouched, and then give it all to God (see my blogpost, “Make Room for Flowers,” about giving up the ‘rocks’ in our hearts). Maybe I hadn’t freely offered those flowers, but later in the day I found myself thinking, “I hope they’re on someone else’s front porch, making them smile.”

I realize we’ve only scratched the surface of all the power behind this prayer. Still, let’s allow the words to sink into our souls. Let’s open our hearts and hands; let’s trust God to fill us with His love and grace and, by doing so, free ourselves to love as He loves.

“I sought the Lord, and He answered me; He set me free from all my fears.” –Psalm 34:5

 

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Make Room for Flowers

 Don’t you love seeing the beautiful variety of flowers in people’s yards, and wildflowers popping up everywhere? The landscape is bursting with color!

A vase full of rocks has no room for flowers. A heart full of rocks has no room for peace.

I like rocks, and love finding ones with fun shapes. But rocks don’t belong in a vase, and I try to keep them out of my heart.  What ‘rocks’ do we sometimes feel in our hearts? Things like hatred, greed, resentment, envy, and pride.

I’ll share with you a situation when God, in His immense goodness, removed from my heart the rock of pride. I had had an encounter with someone who offended me -- something we’ve all experienced. I felt hurt, and the problem grew not so much from their actions to me as from my recounting the incident over and over in my mind and nursing my bruised ego. As time went on, though, I realized that focusing on myself was dragging me down. I wanted God’s peace; I wanted to acknowledge the hurt, learn from it, and let it go. I knew that, since God had forgiven me (countless times) for offending others, I had to forgive those who offended me, and I couldn’t do this without His help. As all these thoughts swirled in my mind, I came upon this verse:

“All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling must be removed from you, along with all malice. And be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.”—Ephesians 4:31-32

Boy, did that hit home. So I sat down and prayed: first, for the grace to let go of this grudge, and then for His blessings on the other person. Finally, I asked God to take away the rock in my heart and clear the way for His peace. I pictured myself picking up the rock, lifting it up to God and saying, “Here! Take this!”   

And God, in His infinite grace, freed me! The tightness in my chest loosened and the bitter feelings left me. I still had the intellectual knowledge of what had transpired, but the rock of pride was gone and the flower of peace took its place. You must understand that this was God’s doing, not mine! I then offered prayers of thanksgiving and asked Him for the strength to resist this sin in the future. Be assured that He can and will remove the rocks in our hearts over and over again if we trust in His goodness!

“Praise be to God, 

who has not rejected my prayer

  or withheld his love from me!”--Psalm 66:20

 

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Prayer of St. Francis -- Paraphrased

 

“Prayer is nothing else but union with God… My little children, your hearts are small, but prayer stretches them and makes them capable of loving God. Through prayer we receive a foretaste of heaven and something of paradise comes down upon us.” –St. John Vianney

Sometimes when we pray, we say the familiar words without actually praying them. Paraphrasing a familiar prayer is one way to give it greater meaning, which helps us pray it.  I’ve paraphrased The Prayer of St. Francis, a prayer that sets high the bar for holiness, in hopes that it inspires all of us to put its rich lessons into practice:

 

Lord, make me a person who brings Your peace to the people around me.

Help me remember that making peace or bringing peace 

is not the same as keeping the peace:

One is active and rooted in love; the other is passive and rooted in fear.

When I feel hatred, or when someone hates me,

let me treat them with kindness, pray for them,

and want nothing but goodness for them.

When there are offenses and hurt feelings,

let me be humble and either ask for or grant forgiveness.

When someone doubts You or Your goodness,

let me show them Your powerful love so they dare to have faith in You.

When someone feels despair,

let me listen with compassion and give them hope.

When someone lives in darkness, hiding, and fear,

let me show them the freedom of living in Your light and grace.

When someone feels sad,

let me offer a shoulder to cry on and give them reason to smile.

O Lord,

Let me strive to comfort others more than seek comfort for myself.

Let me try to understand more than seek to be understood.

Let me concern myself more with showing love than with receiving love.

Help me remember that when I give, I receive much in return;

as I pardon others, so will I be pardoned;

and by dying I will be raised to eternal life. Amen.

 

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