I guess this is a bit of a follow-up to “When you feel like you have nothing left to give”.   I’m thinking of how so often I feel that when I try to give to folks, I don’t feel like I’m doing it very well or saying it very well.  Dom Hebert van Zeller addresses this in the following excerpt from his book, The Inner Search.  Too often I’m more concerned about how well I’m doing things rather than about the importance of just doing something and and maybe doing it badly, but being willing to be humble.  Of course, this is true of loving God as well as loving my neighbor.  It’s important for us to know who we really are as well as who God really is.  A lesson I’m obviously still learning.

What costs the soul most is not the service itself, or the love itself, or the suffering itself, but the sense of serving badly, suffering badly, loving badly.  What God wants is not only the acts of service, love, suffering, but the acts of resignation to personal insufficiency.
       For the soul to know that the whole purpose is to search after God, and at the same time to see how half-hearted is its search, must lead either to dependence or to defeat.  If the soul makes use of the knowledge and trust in God, it learns humility.  If the soul makes use of the light only in order to be miserable, it exchanges the darkness of faith for the darkness of self.  The grace of true humility is sacrificed for the false comfort of self pity.