Thursday, March 2, 2017

Anything but that...

Mme. Jeanne Guyon

"God intends for your soul to really die to the ways of self nature. He sometimes permits an apparent (not a real) mistake to be made, so that your reputation will be destroyed in the eyes of men. I once knew a person of the interior way who came upon a number of most terrible crosses. Among them was the loss of her reputation. Her reputation was something to which she was extremely attached. She could not bring herself to give up her reputation. She begged God to give her any cross but that thus she formally refused to consent to that cross.

"She told me that since that time there had been no spiritual progress in her life. She has remained where she was! So total and so fatal was this reservation to her progress that, since that time, the Lord has never once given her humiliations in the sight of others; nor, since that time, has He given her the grace of spiritual progress!"

Final Steps in Christian Maturity, pages 37-38

(In Zen Buddhism it is said that 'a great difficulty is a great gate'. If you won't go through it you're stopped.)

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