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July 13 - August 16, 2025
You have to let your father and father figures go. You must stop seeing yourself through their eyes and trying to make them proud of you.
You must believe in the yes that comes back when you ask, “Do you love me?” You must choose this yes even when you do not experience it.
In the presence of the people you love, your needs grow and grow, until those people are so overwhelmed by your needs that they are practically forced to leave you for their own survival.
When others stop loving you, you do not have to stop loving them. On a human level, changes might be necessary, but on the level of the divine, you can remain faithful to your love.
One day you will be free to give gratuitous love, a love that does not ask for anything in return. One day also you will be free to receive gratuitous love. Often love is offered to you, but you do not recognize it.
You are called to live out of a new place, beyond your emotions, passions, and feelings. As long as you live amid your emotions, passions, and feelings, you will continue to experience loneliness, jealousy, anger, resentment, and even rage, because those are the most obvious responses to rejection and abandonment.
You are living through an unusual time. You see that you are called to go toward solitude, prayer, hiddenness, and great simplicity.
You sense that nothing but God’s love can fulfill your deepest need while the pull to other people and things remains strong. It seems that peace and anguish exist side by side in you, that you desire both distraction and prayerful concentration.
Because where God wants you to be, God holds you safe and gives you peace, even when there is pain.
Every time you do something that comes from your needs for acceptance, affirmation, or affection, and every time you do something that makes these needs grow, you know that you are not with God.
What is your pain? It is the experience of not receiving what you most need.
You carry your own beautiful, deeply loved self in your heart. You
yourself, “All is lost. I have to start all over again.” This is not true. What you have gained, you have gained.
You do not fully feel at home in your body; you look down on it as if it were not a good enough, beautiful enough, or pure enough place to meet Jesus. When you look attentively at your
It is obviously good not to act on your sudden emotions. But you don’t have to repress them, either. You can acknowledge them and let them pass by. In a certain sense, you have to befriend them so that you do not become their
Do not be discouraged. Be sure that God will truly fulfill all your needs. Keep remembering that. It will help you not to expect that fulfillment from people who you already know are incapable of giving it.
There is a part of you that too easily gives in to others’ influence. As soon as someone questions your motives, you start doubting yourself. You end up agreeing with the other before you have consulted your own heart. Thus you grow passive and simply assume that the other knows better.
Where you are most human, most yourself, weakest, there Jesus lives. Bringing your fearful self home is bringing Jesus home.
As your body, heart, and mind come to know that you are loved, your
Hold on to your chosen direction, your discipline, your prayer, your work, your guides, and trust that one day love will have conquered enough of you that even the most fearful part will allow love to cast out all fear.
It is also important that those who belong to the body of which you are part keep faith in your journey.
Do not hesitate to love and to love deeply.
or you can stand straight in your pain and let the soil on which you stand become richer and more able to give life to new seeds.
You have to dare to stand erect in your struggles. The temptation is to complain, to beg, to be overwhelmed and find your satisfaction in the pity you evoke.
In this way, real friendships are possible and real community can be formed. God gives you the strength to stand in your struggles and to respond to them standing.
When your deepest self is connected with the deepest self of another, that person’s absence may be painful, but it will lead you to a profound communion with the person, because loving each other is loving in God.
Then the pain of absence reveals a certain lack of trust in God’s love. But God is enough for you.
Giving yourself to others without expecting anything in return is only possible when you have been fully received. Every time you discover that you expect something in return for what you have given or are disappointed when nothing comes back to you, you are being made aware that you yourself are not yet fully received.
A lot of giving and receiving has a violent quality, because the givers and receivers act more out of need than out of trust.
When you know yourself as fully loved, you will be able to give according to the other’s capacity to receive, and you will be able to receive according to the other’s capacity to give. You
Different people have different ways of being present. You have to know and claim your way.
When you get exhausted, frustrated, overwhelmed, or run down, your body is saying that you are doing things that are none of your business. God does not require of you what is beyond your ability, what leads you away from God, or what makes you depressed or sad. God wants you to live for others and to live that presence well.
Your community needs you, but maybe not as a constant presence. Your community might need you as a presence that offers courage and spiritual food for the journey, a presence that creates the safe ground in which others can grow and develop, a presence that belongs to the matrix of the community.
the danger exists that you will use the other to seek healing for yourself. When you speak to others about your pain without fully owning it, you expect something from them that they cannot give. As a result, you will feel frustrated, and those you wanted to help will feel confused, disappointed, or even further burdened.
yelling, crying, and even physical fighting might be expressions of liberation.
can take in and hold on to, the less fearful you will become. You will speak more simply, more directly, and more freely about what is important to you, without fear of other people’s reactions.
The more you come to know yourself—spirit, mind, and body—as truly loved, the freer you will be to proclaim the good news. That is the freedom of the children of God.
There is within you a lamb and a lion. Spiritual maturity is the ability to let lamb and lion lie down together. Your lion is your adult, aggressive self.
Dare to love and to be a real friend. The love you give and receive is a reality that will lead you closer and closer to God as well as to those whom God has given you to love.
Trust that those who love you want to show you
You might think that you are being generous in giving access to anyone who wants to enter or leave, but you will soon find yourself losing your soul.
When you claim for yourself the power over your drawbridge, you will discover new joy and peace in your heart and find yourself able to share that joy and peace with others.
“Stay home, and trust that your life will be fruitful even when hidden.”
It is not going to be easy to listen to God’s call. Your insecurity, your self-doubt, and your great need for affirmation make you lose trust in your inner voice and run away from yourself.
As you see more clearly that your vocation is to be a witness to God’s love in this world, and as you become more determined to live out that vocation, the attacks of the enemy will increase.
