PARADOXICAL

Personal Growth

It takes time to grow to a maturity of the heart. ... Little by little, as we live and work with others, especially if we are well-guided, we learn to break out of the shell of selfishness and self-centredness where we seek to be brilliant and to prove our goodness, wisdom and power. We receive and give the knocks of life. We all have to discover that there are others like us who have gifts and needs; no one of us is the centre of the world. We are a small but important part in our universe. We all have a part to play. We need one another.

- Jean Vanier, Becoming Human, pp. 58-59

"Deep within my soul/I can sense the change/Glory to glory once again!"

- from "A New Beginning" in the play Joseph the Dreamer

It's that time of life once again that the Lord is calling me to another new phase. I don't know what it is but I am excited. Although the excitement is tinged with fear, I trust that the Lord in his love for me will bring me to what is best. Amen!

(Or doing the empty chair technique with God)


Help me to love my family right this time, Lord. Help me to accept in love the father, the mother, and the siblings you’ve given me. They are highly flawed people, just like me, imperfectly loved, so imperfectly loving. But you gave them all to me as gifts, each one a valuable treasure that fits my own needs. You placed them in my life to teach me a lesson. They came exactly as I needed them, to grow, to learn to love.

I realize all the sacrifice I did for them was out of love. Help me to forgive myself and love myself right as well. I am not as bad and selfish as I thought I was. All the things that I did for my family was out my great love for them. Alas, it has been tainted by my great need to be loved. I felt, wrongly, that I was empty without that love, not knowing I was loved after all, though not in the manner I had expected. I assumed, wrongly, that I could get all the love I needed from mere humans. I never thought that I was already whole and complete when I was born because I have you; you were there from the start. You are the one who made me, after all.

I guess I was too young to know that I should strike a balance between loving myself and loving others. In loving others through my family, I forgot myself. I neglected my own neediness, unable to express it. What I got instead was layers of resentment that I bottled up for years. All that is gone now, for whether or not I was indeed abused or whether or not my boundaries for healthy self-love violated, I had a hand in it through my wrong choices. A big part of it was self-inflicted.

But I forgive myself for that as well. I was, after all, too young to see those things. I was bound to stumble and fall, so I could learn my lessons and grow from there, to sort out what went wrong from what went right.

This time, Lord, teach me to love right. Teach me to love my father, my mother, my siblings, myself, and the world beyond my family in the right way – balanced, mutually giving and taking freely out of love, respectful of boundaries, anticipating each other’s needs and wants, and without a taint of selfishness.

The balance of give and take is key, not to keep tabs of each other’s contribution in the love equation but out of freedom of choice as the situation calls for it, driven by one’s generosity of heart.

Banish from me all the fallen desires of the ego, Lord, so that I can learn to love and serve the ultimate being deserving of that love: You.

And the Lord said:

Don’t be too hard on yourself, son. I love you. I see everything. I know your heart. Beneath your flaws, you are a good man. I believe in you. Trust me that I am there right in the middle of your pain. I will continue healing you. I will heal your relationships. I will help you in your many earthly trials. I will refresh you after the afflictions that I have allowed in your life so you’d learn. Know that I do everything out of love, not in anger, hate, or punishment. I don’t love as men do. Have faith: believe in me that my love for you is greater than all human loves combined. Nothing can outdo the goodness and generosity of God.

The gifts bestowed on me are not mine, not for my own personal glory, not to feed my hungry ego, but to be in service of God and His people.

The gifts bestowed on me are not mine, not for my own personal glory, not to feed my hungry ego, but to be in service of God and His people.