You know the way for me
You know the time
Into your hands
I trustingly place mine 
Your plan is perfect 
Born of perfect love
You know the way for me
 That is enough 

September 2020
            I had the task a few years ago to find my favorite bible verse. I thought it would be difficult because there are many that ring true with me as I’m sure they do with you. I knew though; I knew from the very first day I read it, it was “my” verse:
1 Corinthians 15:9-10
“For I am the least of the apostles, not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am and His grace to me has not been ineffective. Indeed, I have toiled harder than all of them; not I however, but the grace of God that is with me.”
            God has brought me to a place where I can see all of my hardness, all of my coldness, all of the ways that I have taken the words given to me and made them my own. Yes, sometimes, I speak harshly. Yes, sometimes, I sound like I know it all (I do not). Yes, I have spoken to God this way too. I am the least of these; no more important than the soil in the ground. But within me, within us all, God has placed a grace. That grace is very similar to the seeds within the soil. The seeds get planted and cannot become anything except for that which they are intended to be. So too it is with you and I. God intends us to be something to work for His good so that seed of grace might grow and flourish. It takes effort and patience and forgiveness and love to make things grow and flourish. We must work to tend to the seed God has planted. We must fertilize it in prayer and penance and reading Scripture and fulfilling our vocation. We must care for it by sitting with God or Mary or Joseph or a Saint, in the silence, to listen to God’s words of love and then we must be willing to pass that love on to others to help them grow too. It is a difficult thing to get over our old ways of thinking and doing because it means we have to step out of the darkness and into the light. The light which is unknown to us and blinds us more than the comfort of the dark. And if we toil this hard, how much more does our Heavenly Father? Our Father, whose grace is within us, trying to break through our hardened hearts and selfish minds and ignorant bliss and rampant justifications for why we can’t change and just be His. He works so much harder than us because He must break us from the darkness and breaking someone hurts both parties. I would argue that it hurts Him more because He knows what is about to happen and He hurts before we even begin to, our Father hurts with the thought of it. There are many holy people we can look to for guidance here because they have all been witnesses to the greatness of God’s grace no matter what their state was in life before He came into the picture. And once God pulled them, broke them out of their darkness, He helped adjust their eyes to the light. Everything becomes clearer with light shone on it. Suddenly there comes an understanding that nothing is our own; not our homes, our families, our kids, or even ourselves. None of it is ours, it is all His. God shows us where He has stepped up and stepped in to work our mistakes out for good because He loves us. The more He reveals to us, the more we understand what He is asking us to do, and the more humbled we are to the grace He has given and the effort He has made for a seed to grow within our nothingness of dirt.


Submitted by an anonymous Schoenstatt  member