List of points

You must be constant and demanding with yourself in your regular practices of piety, also when you feel tired or they seem to be arid. Persevere! Those moments are like the tall red-painted poles which serve as markers along the mountain roads when there are heavy snowfalls. They are always there to show where it is safe to go.

Interior life is strengthened by a daily struggle in your practices of piety, which you should fulfil — or rather which you should live! — lovingly, because the path we travel as children of God is a path of Love.

A resolution: to be faithful to my timetable — heroically faithful and without excuses — on ordinary days and on extraordinary days.

Your life cannot be the repetition of actions which are all the same, because the next one should be more upright, more effective, more full of love than the last. Each day should mean new light, new enthusiasm — for Him!

Every single day, do what you can to know God better, to get acquainted with him, to fall more in love with him each moment, and to think of nothing but of his Love and his glory.

You will carry out this plan, my child, if you never, for any reason whatever, give up your times of prayer, your presence of God, with the aspirations and spiritual communions that set you on fire, your unhurried Holy Mass, and your work, finished off well for him.

When you open the Holy Gospel, think that what is written there — the words and deeds of Christ — is something that you should not only know, but live. Everything, every point that is told there, has been gathered, detail by detail, for you to make it come alive in the individual circumstances of your life.

—God has called us Catholics to follow him closely. In that holy Writing you will find the Life of Jesus, but you should also find your own life.

You too, like the Apostle, will learn to ask, full of love, “Lord, what would you have me do?…” And in your soul you will hear the conclusive answer, “The Will of God!”

Take up the Gospel every day, then, and read it and live it as a definite rule. This is what the saints have done.