Purification

I know that it's usually a bad sign when anxiety begins to overtake your sense of peace.  Usually means something's not right and you need to reexamine some stuff.

Anxiety about job and money issues has slowly been eating away at my peace, dragging me back down into the depths of... I'm not even sure how to explain my state of mind lately.  Worried, stressed, anxious, depressed, unmotivated, frustrated, I-just-want-to-curl-up-into-a-ball-and-hide-in-a-corner-until-everything-is-worked-out.

It's been particularly difficult because it has felt as though I can't even bring all of this to the Lord.  I have it swimming around in my head all day long and then, when I'm finally able to to go to Adoration or to Mass or to prayer of any sort, everything just slips away.  Everything is a blank and if I can say anything to Jesus, it's merely, "Well I had something to talk to you about..."

Okay, okay, Jesus.  I get it.  It's not time to talk about all of that right now.  You just want me to be still and to be with You.  To sit with You, to love You.


And then my mind wanders, I pull it back.  It begins to wander again, I pull it back.  I wonder why I'm even at prayer.  But that's a brief thought because it's been ingrained in me to persevere through these times of dryness.  So I sit there.  Still.  Quiet.  Doing nothing.

Of course, a few hours after prayer, I'm back to worrying, anxiety, and all of the above.  Perhaps because I have nothing to do but think about those things.  About how badly I want to enter.  About how badly I want a good-paying job so I can work on my student loans...

Silly Kayla.

Abandonment.

It's time for a purification of my desires.  Why is it that I want so badly to enter the convent?  To be exclusively His.  To be concerned only with Him.  To love Him more.  To be made perfect.  To be possessed by and to possess Him.  In a word: Jesus.

A desire put into my heart by God Himself.  A desire that He will fulfill, in His own time.  Not mine.

So why focus on something other than the only desire of my heart?  Why focus so much and worry so much about money or about a job, however well ordered those desires are toward my ultimate desire?  God well knows my needs, He well knows what is needed in order for me to enter.  So why focus on anything but Jesus right now?

Have I let my desire to enter the convent become something more than my desire for Jesus?  Am I pursuing my own desires over the will of God?

Abandonment.  Abandonment to God's will.  Right here, right now.

Oh this lesson should be so familiar to me.  It has been the one He has been teaching all year long.  A purification of my desires... a purification to only one thing: Jesus.  My other desires, they are good things.  They are goods in and of themselves.  But they are not the Good.  Purification.

And that's what I desire in the religious life, is it not?  To be made pure?  So why should I flee from the purifying hand of God outside of the convent?

The desire burns within me, a desire put into my heart by God.  But first, before He should allow me to attain to it, He wants to purify my desires.

Jesus, be my only desire.


Silly Kayla.  Silly, silly Kayla.  Funny how even a good thing can become somehow prohibiting in one's relationship with God.

Funny how God can remind a soul of something like this in a single moment of grace.  Then the soul is presented with two options: to work with this gift, this out-pouring of grace, and amend one's life, to present itself before God and abandon everything at His feet.  Or to ignore the movement of grace and continue in its stubborn ways.

Jesus, be my only desire.