List of points

Make an effort to respond at each moment to what God is asking of you: have the will to love him with deeds. — They may be little deeds, but don’t leave out a single one.

You must instil in all souls the heroism of doing the little things of each day perfectly, as if the salvation of the world depended on each one of those actions.

Surely all those consolations I receive from the Master are given me so that I may think of him all the time and serve him in little things, and so be able to serve him in great things.

—A resolution: to please my good Jesus in the tiniest details of my daily life.

You are certain it was God who made you see quite clearly that you must return to the more childlike little things of your earlier interior life, and persevere for months and even years in those heroic trivialities. (You needn’t take into account your feelings here since they are so often slow to recognise the good.) Your will may be cold but let it be ready to fulfil those little duties out of Love.

Take a good look at the way you behave. You will see that you are full of faults that harm you and perhaps also those around you.

—Remember, my child, that microbes may be no less a menace than wild beasts. And you are cultivating those errors and those mistakes — just as bacteria are cultivated in a laboratory — with your lack of humility, with your lack of prayer, with your failure to fulfil your duty, with your lack of self-knowledge… Those tiny germs then spread everywhere.

—You need to make a good examination of conscience every day. It will lead you to make definite resolutions to improve, because it will have made you really sorry for your shortcomings, omissions and sins.

It is not the spirit of penance to do great mortifications some days, and nothing on others.

—The spirit of penance means knowing how to overcome yourself every single day, offering up both great and small things for love, without putting on show.

Have you that urge, that divine madness, to bring souls to know the Love of God? In your ordinary life, then, offer up mortifications, pray, do your duty, and conquer yourself in all kinds of tiny details.

In modico fidelis! — faithful in little things. Your job, my son, is not just to save souls but to bring them to holiness, day after day, giving to each moment — even to apparently commonplace moments — the dynamic echo of eternity.