Your love created life. 
What is a gift?
Your gift is everything.

* * *

I am a servant not because I am perfect. I am a servant because I truly care about the suffering of others -- because your suffering is God's suffering, and God's suffering is my suffering. Because God's love lives inside of us. Because we are temples. Shelters to one another. Walls. Palaces. Because we are the kingdom. 

I don't care about simple terms like "religious" or "nonreligious." Those words mean nothing to me. I am concerned with kindness -- with love -- with the state of the heart. The state of the heart is the same as your relationship with God. It needs to be pure. Clear. Like water.

And yes, it has to be God. It is not enough to simply be good. You need to know why you are being good -- that you are striving toward something -- that there is a goal, a plateau, a deeper understanding of life. 

There is a method to living. A method that will give you answers, that will let you see God. It is not a story, a fairytale, a metaphor -- something to be learned as children and then forgotten. There is Truth in the world. There is cohesion, synergism, totality. How do you find it? You follow Christ's path.

You follow it all the way. 

Prostrate yourself. Die on a cross -- live every day, every thought, in sacrifice.

Forgetting yourself allows you to experience a higher reality, a higher sense of unity. Forgetting yourself allows you to see God. He is in everything. If only the world knew -- He is real, He is real -- I promise you -- it is All Real.

I was asked the other day to list my answered prayers. It was an exercise of faith.

But honestly, it's hard to list the individual answered prayers. Looking back on my life, it feels like one answered prayer led to the next and to the next. Like everything has been a long chain of blessings. I think we need to have a certain amount of humility to realize that.

God's voice is Peace. God's presence is Love. My life is blessed and even when walking the darkest valleys, I have always seen that. How can I list one answered prayer when I see my entire life as an answered prayer?

When we know that God loves us unconditionally, we can accept that all things correspond to the good of the soul. It is God's plan that we become like Him. When we can accept that, we can forgive Him for our hardships and relish them instead, as they bring us closer to His kingdom, closer to the true nature of the heart.

Ask yourself -- what has made you more humble? What has made you more forgiving? What has taught you compassion? Surely, it has been loss after loss after loss. These are God's treasures -- these are God's blessings -- this is God's will.