Ave Maria Meditations
Increasingly, I see that God seems to expect from me a ministry of prayer and suffering. What a blessed vocation, and how much I will try to respond better than in the past, loving the cross of Jesus, taking up the cross daily, always placing my burden of pain, deprivations, and weaknesses in God’s heart. Strict with myself, I want to be only kind and gentle with my neighbor. To live in interior union with our God, and to make of all the monotony, triviality, and simple duties of my life so many prayers for others. To have a Eucharistic heart, never losing sight of my vocation of prayer, suffering, and reparation.
How well you know, O God, how to shape us and how suffering purifies us! Perhaps You have accepted my interior offering. In spite of inexpressible vexations, trials, and deprivations of soul and body, I can say a joyful fiat, if by so much suffering I obtain the fulfillment of my desires and all the graces I have hoped for, and if my sufferings serve others.
I offer all to You all dryness, deprivation, spiritual isolation, overwhelming physical distress. To others I can only talk about some of this. Only You know how costly some efforts are, how certain weaknesses humiliate me. I want to welcome even these trials; and I want to be cheerful and smiling the next time toward suffering, in everything and for everyone.
My beloved Savior is close to my heart, I am united to the cross, and I wish only for the fulfillment in me, for me, through me, of God’s will. Yes, through all the shocks, pain, and sacrifices of life, I want to give complete and joyous assent to His beloved will from the depth of my being.
The Servant of God Elisabeth Leseur
