List of points

You feel happier. But this time it is a fidgety sort of happiness, a bit impatient. With it comes the clear feeling that something is being wrested from you as a sacrifice.

Listen to me carefully: here on earth there is no perfect happiness. That is why, now, immediately, without complaining or feeling a victim, you should offer yourself as an oblation to God, with total and absolute self-surrender.

Sacrifice, sacrifice! It is true that to follow Jesus Christ is to carry the Cross — He has said so. But I don’t like to hear souls who love Our Lord speak so much about crosses and renunciations, because where there is Love, it is a willing sacrifice — though it remains hard — and the cross is the Holy Cross.

—A soul which knows how to love and give itself in this way, is filled with peace and joy. Therefore, why insist on “sacrifice”, as if you were seeking consolation, if Christ’s Cross — which is your life — makes you happy?

There are three extremely important things you need to do to draw people to God. Forget yourself, and think only of the glory of your Father God. Subject your will filially to the Will of Heaven, as Jesus Christ taught you. Follow with docility the lights of the Holy Spirit.

Ask Jesus to grant you a Love like a purifying furnace, where your poor flesh — your poor heart — may be consumed and cleansed of all earthly miseries. Pray that it may be emptied of self and filled with him. Ask him to grant you a deep-seated aversion to all that is worldly so that you may be sustained only by Love.

Love is also strengthened by self-denial and mortification.

The people of that land, so far away from God and lost, reminded you of the Master’s words: “They are like sheep without a shepherd.”

—And you too were filled with a strong feeling of compassion deep within you… Make up your mind, where you are now, to give your life as a holocaust for all.

Do you entertain a spirit of opposition, of contradiction? Very well, exercise it by opposing and contradicting yourself.