Pausing to Review the Graces We Have Received

Guide: The Graces Take Us Deeper

We pause again to let the graces we have received penetrate our hearts more deeply. We are making this retreat in the midst of our everyday lives. We let these reflections become everyday for us — more familiar and comfortable. We prepare to move into the contemplations that Jesus will show us about his own life’s journey.

This week doesn’t take us into new territory. It just takes us deeper. We begin this week with our desires. I renew my desire, my passion, my choice, to be with Jesus — to want to know him more intimately, to love him more deeply, to follow him with more of my heart. This week is not one of deeper struggle or more intense thinking. This is a week of affirmation. All week, in many very concrete ways, in the background experience of the in between times, I say, “Yes, this is what I want. This is what I choose. To be with you, Jesus.”

This is a week to deepen these graces by enjoying them. I know that this deepening relationship with Jesus is changing me, freeing me, moving me to learn even more about him, all because I love this person who loves me so completely, so unconditionally. I just feel it all week — and enjoy it. I like the way I’m becoming. I like what is opening up in me.

All week I will pause, perhaps especially in the most difficult moments, and smile with a deepening inner smile. The riches and the honors just don’t have such a hold on me. The poverty experiences, even moments of humiliation, don’t terrify me as much. I smile because I understand and am becoming more and more attracted to Jesus’ way of living his life — moving away from the path to pride and toward the path to humility before God.

Each night this week, I let my words of gratitude come from deeper and deeper in my heart. The messiness or difficulties — even the failures or sin of my day — don’t take away my gratitude. They deepen it. I’m grateful because Jesus is drawing me into a joy I hadn’t known before. It is a joy that is dependent not on my successes but on my life being placed with Jesus, in God’s hands.

Consider sharing the graces you have received
this week with others making the retreat.

Listen to each week of the Online Retreat
on a CD or on your mp3 player.