I’m one of those people who constantly gets stuck in the rut of trying to fix myself, to make myself better, and then to approach God.  Be perfect before I seek His help.  Well, you can imagine how well that works out.  God, in His great mercy, keeps working on changing that attitude.  That’s why I love this piece by Sister Ruth Burrows.  The answer is in the second to the last sentence.  Read on.

Let me stress a little more the supreme importance of refusing to evade our own personal poverty, refusing to be discouraged by it.  Only too easily, self-disgust and discouragement become spiritual waste.  I think it is of utmost importance to use everything for loving.  After all, our lives are made up of “nothings”!  We can be on the lookout for the big occasions and let slip the hundreds of little opportunities when divine love is asking to be let in.

Nothing about us is hidden from the loving, compassionate eyes of God, but when we are feeling miserable within, shamed, silly, dirty even, we hide away.  God isn’t in all this, we implicitly assume.  But God is in all this, to us, contemptible stuff.  We love very much by this lack of childlike trust.

Through what is happening to us, we are brought to face our sinfulness, our selfishness, our inadequacy or whatever it is.  Yet this is God’s moment.  It, I believe, in the constant, almost hourly choices that these humiliating, self-revealing experiences afford us, that true holiness and union with God is brought about.  I’m sure that what God longs for us to do is never to stop looking in his compassionate eyes.  Nothing is too small, pathetic or shameful to be used for love.