HOW CONVINCED ARE YOU THAT GOD IS ALIVE?

A childhood friend of Eugene’s, Felix d’Albertas, had expressed difficulties about the quality of his faith. Eugene responded:

One sentence of your last-but-one letter, dear Felix, really upset me. I cannot bear to think you are not perfectly happy and I would do anything in the world to dispel all your distresses and perplexities…

Eugene wrote to encourage him and gave some guidelines to re-assure him:

You sincerely want to achieve your salvation;
you are trying in an upright way to take the means that seem to you proper to achieve it;
you are not relying on your own strength but place all your trust in God,
whom you love as a good Father;
how can there be any anxiety after that?
It does injury in a way to the grace of Jesus Christ who has so lovingly gone before you…
So be of good courage, my dear friend; continue to serve God with love and gratitude; this is the shortest way, it is right on target.

To Count Felix d’Albertas, 14 September 1820, O.W. XV n. 153

An invitation to me today to reflect on the place of God in my life: do I sincerely want God to be alive in me, am I consciously co-operating with God, and do I rely on God’s grace in my life to achieve this and to bring me serenity? In my interaction with others, how convincing am I that God is alive in my life?

 

“How do you convince a world that God is alive? By His aliveness in your life, by His work in producing reality in your experience.”     Howard G. Hendricks

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2 Responses to HOW CONVINCED ARE YOU THAT GOD IS ALIVE?

  1. Pat McGee says:

    St. Eugene knew in his own experience that God does for us what we can’t do for ourselves!

  2. Eleanor Rabnett, Oblate Associate says:

    There is much today to reflect on. There is a tone of tenderness in Eugene’s writing to his friend as he reflects on how Count Felix d’Albertas is trying to live and his response to urge him to continue on in the same vein. I love it when he writes “It does injury in a way to the grace of Jesus Christ who has so lovingly gone before you…”. We, so many of us, were brought up to believe that our very humaness was bad and that we had to somehow be perfect, to be worthy of being loved by God. Yet it is precisely in our pain and imperfections that we find the mercy of God and hear God calling us “beloved”. As you said, it is an invitation.

    I echo the questions you dare to ask yourself, particularly “consciously co-operating with God” – not just letting it happen (or not) but consciously ….. It is for me a daily thing. Yesterday I heard the “cock crow” a couple of times during my day, and so today I start anew and ask how will I live out that God is the core of my life, how will I give my all? How will I allow that tenderness to come out in my day today?

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