If You Trust Me... #1

I do not regret this.

I do not regret that when I told of my intention to undertake the 30-week Spiritual Exercises I met with disapproval. Of course, the Lord knew why I needed to go through it. Because when I was already halfway through, only then did I hear words of support and — most importantly — someone noticed the changes happening within me.

I also had to pass through my own doubts. I thought I would not cope. To demand an extra hour of myself every day for such a long time... I thought I would lack the discipline. Yet one of the most important discoveries for me afterwards was that the capacity for discipline, the movement of the will, and so on — all of it comes from God’s grace.
Even knowing that I could not do it on my own, the surest course was to put my trust in God.
"They pressed hard upon me that I might fall, but the Lord helped me..." Ps 117.

I do not regret having given the Lord my consent to accompany me into the darkest corners of my memories.

I grew up in the internet age, which meant the air already carried that taste of licence and corruption, all manner of filth to which a child or adolescent online might be tempted.

A large part of the Spiritual Exercises was devoted to a detailed review of the whole case history — my sinfulness. The Lord and Mary led me into the memories I had hidden even from myself. They opened up my sores, allowing me to see how badly I had neglected my traumas and wounds. And each time. Again and again. They asked if I was willing to go further. Of course I was not ready; I did not understand. But I said yes. And they understand that state: Mary once also pronounced Her fiat. One act of trust is enough.

I was afraid, in pain, bitter. I would say that the Lord took my consent very seriously and worked quite concretely. At times without anaesthesia. Bringing the same situations into the present and stirring up the same reactions as several years before, when the wound had only just been inflicted. The Lord and Mary allowed me to see some of my shadow selves, to see in full how I had suppressed the beautiful and how it turned into vice, poisoning life both for me and for those near me.
Here there took place a confession for my whole life, for which the Lord pulled me out of my familiar surroundings into a town and a church I had never been to and would probably never have known about otherwise.

And now — I no longer harbour hatred towards relatives, I do not feel anger or desire vengeance for my childhood and youth; I do not react to people whose character and behaviour remind me of those stories. I no longer live in constant tension and in expectation of threat.
"Test me, O Lord, and try me; melt my inward parts and my heart..." Ps 25.

From the first days the Lord kept repeating to me: "If you trust Me...", accompanying His words with images of a sky strewn with stars as with Abraham, or of a ladder reaching up into heaven along which angels ascended, and He stood there stretching out His hand to me...

I do not regret that I trusted Him. He has freed me from shackles. I no longer have to merely survive. The Lord has taught me to live.
(And I know that this is only the beginning).