iCrucified

While reading from one of my devotional books, I ran across these thoughts:

You have not noticed that you are chained. You do not struggle as a dog on a leash. Your inner vision has grown dull. God is in you, but you do not perceive him.

This explains why you abandon your interior self and drift away from God. It is the darkness in you that makes you uncomfortable with yourself. You divert your attention with external things and the opinions of others. These things are not your problem. Your spiritual blindness is the culprit.

When you become dissatisfied with your own false self, you will begin to return to God.

Pay more attention to your own behavior than to the things other people do. The person most valuable to others is the one who attends to his or her own faith and character.

Be careful not to irritate people. Instead of chasing them away, help them to get rid of their faults. Do this with a loving spirit. The offensive thing is not human nature, but the vices which blemish it. The only reason to probe into the wounds of others is to heal them.

If you want to reject an evil person, begin with yourself.

Guigo I: Meditations

Try to be patient with the defects and blemishes in others. You also have many things about you that they must endure. If you can’t make yourself what you want to be, how can you expect to remake somebody else?

While demanding that another person be perfect, we ignore our own faults. We like to see others corrected, but we are reluctant to accept correction. We want the law to apply to everybody but ourselves. It is clear that we don’t measure our neighbors and ourselves by the same standard.

If everyone were perfect, there would be nothing in others for us to bear with for God’s sake. But God has seen to it that we must carry each other’s burdens. For no one is without fault, no one is without burden, no one is self-sufficient, and no one is wise enough to make it alone.

therefore, we must support one another, comfort one another, help, teach, and caution one another.

Thomas a’Kempis: The Imitation of Christ