Divine Mercy is our Light in the Darkness

I want to share that because I think that that’s important and there was no obvious reason why, I just felt numb or a little dead inside. Maybe sadness, or gloominess. And again, nothing ever happened, okay I can’t say, oh, this happened and then I was sad, but I just was. It might’ve just been also coming down off the high of Easter. I don’t think that’s what it is, but that could be one explanation, like we worked so hard, we get through holy week, we do the baskets and the kids and all of it and then we come down after that, but this felt different. It felt like being in a haze.

So I just sat with myself, I sat with myself and I loved myself through it and I didn’t try to coach myself too much. Mostly because I tried for a little bit and then when I didn’t know what’s going on, I just sat with myself. Okay, I love you. I don’t know what’s going on but I’m going to sit with you, and you are safe and you are loved and I am with you, and this is okay. I would feel pressure about recording the podcast or just other work things that I have to do and I just feel like, you know what? It’s okay. We’re just going to be.

And obviously we can’t do that for weeks and weeks. We have to get up and feed the kids and live our lives. But, I just allowed it to be there; I just loved myself through it and it is okay. And then I felt the holy spirit kind of nudge me and say, hey, I think it’s time because that was the other thing I you know I tried to be inspirational in this podcast. So when you feel terrible, It doesn’t feel like the right time to go record an inspirational podcast about managing your calendar for May. I’m gonna help you manage your calendar for May, but we’ll talk about that in a different week.

But I really felt like God was saying, why don’t you just share it with them? The other thing I don’t love doing is sharing things that I don’t fully understand, but I almost feel like that was the point. Which is, sometimes we can just feel sad or numb or something and we can just bring it to the Lord, and just say, I feel weary today Lord, just be with me. And he doesn’t ask us to do anything. He just sits with us and he loves us and you’re not broken and nothing is wrong with you. Just a human, having a human experience, sometimes I think deep down that is what we long for is someone to just be with us and not leave us. There are so many ways that the people in our lives, because they are also other humans, they do things and then we feel rejected or abandoned or unwanted. And it doesn’t matter whether they meant to send that message or not.

We tell ourselves that we are rejected and abandoned and unwanted and I think one of the greatest gifts that Jesus gives us is he is just always there willing to sit with you. When I’m sad, I go into my mind, I picture myself and I’m like 10 and I’m sitting on a curb and in my mind, I can see the curb and everything else around me is dark so I don’t even know where that curb is, but I’m sitting on a curb and I’m 10 and I’m just, sad. But I know that anytime I want Jesus will just sit with me. And I think a lot of our healing can come from just that. Just moments where there wasn’t someone to sit with us. And so we invite Jesus into our moments now so that we know that we are never alone. We are never abandoned, we are never rejected, we are never unloved.

Now we may have a lot of human relationships and humans in their humanness in their sinfulness and their woundedness, we end up hurting each other. I will always be true but Jesus is there for you. So in the daily podcast, I’ve been doing this fustiness series and, I just wanted to read to you the one I did for April 4th. So if you want, you can go listen to that episode; but I want, in each episode I do a reading from Faustina’s diary. So, I want to share that reading with you today because I think because one, it just really helped me. It was just exactly what I needed to hear. So I’m hoping that’s true for some of you. So this comes from St. Faustina’s and her diary section 1488. And these first words are from Jesus himself, “I am pleased with your efforts. Oh, soul aspiring for perfection but why do I see you so often sad and depressed, tell me, my child. What is the meaning of this sadness and what is its cause?

And then the soul that Jesus is talking to, and I apologize, I don’t have the diary in front of me, so I don’t know if the soul is Faustina’s or Faustina is sharing the story, this interaction between Jesus and another soul. But I don’t think it really matters, so the soul response Lord, the reason for my sadness is that in spite of my sincere resolutions, I fall again into the same faults. I make resolutions in the morning, but in the evenings, I see how much I have departed from them. And Jesus responds, “You see my child, what you are of yourself the cause of your falls is that you rely too much upon yourself and too little on me, but let this not sadden you so much. You are dealing with the God of mercy which your mercy cannot exhaust. I remember I did not do a lot, only a certain number of pardons. And the soul response. “Yes. I know all that, but great temptations, a sale, me and various stouts awakened within me and moreover everything irritates and discourages me.” and then Jesus responds, “My child, know that the greatest obstacles to holiness are discouragement. And an exaggerated anxiety. These will deprive you of the ability to practice virtue. All temptations united together ought not disturb your interior peace, not even momentarily sensitiveness and discourage other fruits of self-love. You should not become discouraged, but strive to make my love rain in place of your self-love. I have confidence, my child. Do not lose heart in coming for pardon. I’m always ready to forgive you. As often as you beg for it, you glorify my mercy.”

I am always reading the diary, St Faustina. It is often around me and I’m always just reading like a couple of pages here and there. And one of the reasons I think it calls to me so much and I don’t think it’s for everyone, but for me, it’s the acknowledgement from either Faustina or one of the nuns that she lived with, or this soul, if this soul is not Faustina, is the acknowledgement of the pain and the darkness of being human and that we really get to see God respond. Jesus directly responds to this person who said, I’m so discouraged, everything irritates me. And The Lord just says, yeah, I know because when you rely on you, that’s how life feels. When you rely on me it doesn’t feel like that. And I think kind of built into what he’s saying here is, he’s acknowledging, like, yeah, you’re going to blow it all the time. Do not lose heart in coming for pardon? I am always ready to forgive you. We might have to do this a hundred times a day and I do it every night. Every night, I say, Lord, have mercy on me.

And I expect him to pour it out on me to neutralize my weaknesses and my sinfulness. I find such comfort in that. I don’t need to do anything or be anything, but I have to come to him. And just say not my strength, but yours Lord. I bring you this tiny effort; forgive me for my shortcomings and pour out your mercy on me, and to know that it pleases him. And I don’t know, there’s something just so intimate and beautiful about how many words we get from the Lord in this diary. Like you can really just see that he loves us so much and he understands us so deeply. The greatest obstacles to holiness are discouragement and an exaggerated anxiety. And I think that those are really magnified in our modern culture because we have such access to information.

Even just, oh my goodness, even just I’ll just say Bitcoin and Blockchain currency and moving to a digital currency. Like all of that, I have read so many things about that. And if this were 200 years ago and they were changing the currency, we wouldn’t have known it, we wouldn’t have been sitting around being anxious about it. But now it’s like we have 10 different voices in our heads about everything and someone says it’s blue and someone else says it’s green. And we’re learning things in these 30 second bites, it’s maddening. And I think it’s just so easy for us to feel discouraged or have exaggerated anxiety. And he says, don’t do that my friends. Do not disturb your interior peace, not even momentarily. You know, we have a few St quotes about that. Like, lose your peace for nothing; do not lose your peace for anything. Pray and trust and hope and don’t worry. I feel like there’s another Avalon one that I’m forgetting or she’s just like, it’s fine, wait it out. Everything passes, everything changes.

Yes, we are discouraged because we receive so much conflicting information and impossible standards. And I saw a graph the other day of, like income to how much a house cost in the eighties versus now. And it was just, it was such a depressing graph. So one. I’ll fully acknowledge I don’t know that’s true, I just saw it in a reel, feels true though. And you know, if it were to grow commensurately with the income, your house would be maybe half, maybe a third of what you paid for it. And so let’s say it is true that’s discouraging, like working really hard, what it feels like right now is working really hard and having less money. And that is so discouraging. Why, though? Why are we discouraged? How do we think it should be? In what ways are we not trusting the Lord? In what ways are we like, Lord, this shouldn’t be happening.

And what if he’s sitting there going, yeah, it should. You have enough for today? Do not make an idol out of comfort or money or security or your 401k. Love nothing more than me and we will all the time, I want you to know all the time you’re going to love things more than him and then our job is just to go, oh, I’m sorry have mercy on me, forgive me, Lord. As soon as you notice it, I do think divine mercy is the great message of our time. And I think that God knew that we would need it because he knew the world would be such a wreck and we would be pulled in so many directions and he just wanted to say, hey, as you run this crazy gauntlet of modern day living, this is the antidote. And you have an endless supply, like drops in an ocean. That’s how much mercy he has for us. And the worse you behave, the more mercy he has for you. I find a great deal of hope in that. I don’t need to know the future, I don’t need to solve everything, I don’t even really need to know why I was sad.

But I just cling to him and cling to his sacred heart. I cling to this message of mercy and I just think it’s everything. I’m counting on it. I’m all in, all my chips are on the divine mercy, you know, spot in Russian roulette. All my chips are on divine mercy because it’s not going to be based on my merit. And so I just want to invite you, one to just love yourself for where you’re at right now. What would that look like? What would it take for you to just sit with yourself? And just say, I’m just with you right now. It can be really painful to slow down and just sit with yourself and say, I love you, and I’m with you. And then, are you asking for God’s mercy? Do you believe in it?

Do you believe, like he says? I did not do a lot, only a certain number of pardons, it is endless as often as you beg for it, you glorify my mercy. I am always ready to forgive you. Do not lose heart. I love that phrase. So, pray for my heart, I’m praying for your heart. I told my daughter yesterday she was having a bad day, totally unrelated. I come out into the living room and she’s like, oh, I’m kind of sad. And I said, yeah, but look for the beautiful things, and she goes, what I said, yeah, there’s always beautiful things. And I said like, look at the sky or look at a flower, or she loves her chickens. Look at one of your chickens. I said, you know, and this is funny, she was asking me about what the apocalypse means. I was telling her that I said, even in the apocalypse, which isn’t really a real thing or it’s not right now, you know, It’s an idea that we have. And I said, even in the apocalypse, there will be beautiful things and wonderful moments and joy. Because God created the world and he created us, so we can always find it.

And sometimes when I’m sad, the beautiful thing I reach for is that I’m, I can just be with myself or I’m safe enough to just be sad and God is with me. You can feel that no matter what room you’re in, no matter what cross you’re carrying. So, I realize we’re in Easter week and a lot of us are celebrating and that is appropriate, it’s a bright week. The Easter octave is, you know, every day a solemnity. It’s so beautiful, but it’s okay if in a season of celebration, you don’t feel chipper and God is with you. You can believe that he is real and praise his name and still be having a hard day.

All right. My friends, thank you so much for listening. And have a blessed day.