It has been a long break - family has kept me busy.
But as we are talking about loving one another, in Him, for Him, I thought I would post another excerpt. That is cheating, I know, but you will at last be able to exhale, fmn and honora ;-)

Surrendering even our sins

In the past, there were parts of me that I tried to seal away from myself, only accepting half of what I am. Usually, it was the sinful, inadequate part I held on to; the part that made me feel too unworthy to be in God’s presence, the part that made me fear God’s justice.

Then one day, I was filled with the necessity of being thankful to God for every single moment of our lives. Every moment? Some moments don't seem like much for which to be grateful. I sat in front of the tabernacle trying to absorb this idea, asking for the grace to step beyond what I am and become what He wants me to be. And there it was, unavoidable: God loves us.

In order to be, we must know what we are.

But what we are is so stupefying that we need to be in a safe place to see it or we dare not look. We must know our place in the cosmos (which is infinitesimally small, a non-visible arrangement of photons in a universe of burning things) as well as our place in the Heart of God (which is disproportionately huge, given what we are in relation to the cosmos) before we can stand firmly, confidently, in that place and BE WHAT WE ARE.

God provides the safe place from which we can absorb this view and He assimilates there so many of the fragments we have gathered up to now, pulling in every stray thread like a master Weaver, creating a tapestry that we cannot envision. But we must trust that when He severs the last thread, His loom will have yielded precisely what He'd intended from the beginning, and all threads will be centered in Him...

We cannot give Him only what we think is good, or wait until we feel “ready” before giving ourselves to Him; that is holding back, refusing to fully acknowledge what is not good. We often wrestle our weakness and failures, trying to win the victory before fully surrendering ourselves to Him. But we cannot win until we stop wrestling.

We must each turn around and face head-on all that we’ve been trying to run away from, gather back into ourselves what we are working so hard to push away, and accept it all as what we ARE: the pain, the fear, the need, the sin and weakness; but also the grace, the gifts, the joy. All of it is the life we have lived, all lived under His gaze, all part of His plan, and He is waiting to accept our giving it all to Him. We must be wholly His, sins and all. And when we do this, we see that He has saved us already, saved us from ourselves, paid our debt, freed us to be more than we have up until now been able to see.

We are forgiven...
Once we accept this, wholly and humbly, we can see what we are, and glimpse what He is, and recognize our place in the moment. That is truth and that is humbling. Everything before this was blind groveling based on only half of the truth, which is acceptable to God, but less than He - in His incomprehensible love and mercy - desires for us.

And we find it difficult to accept what He desires for us. To know as we are known? To be called His friends? To be embraced and welcomed with robe and ring and feasting? To have a place prepared for us? All this is beyond our comprehension, because we so often make the mistake of thinking that His love is no better than ours.
But, of course, it is infinitely better.

The most awesome and radical threshold is crossed when we truly know and accept with humility the utterly stupefying truth that we are loved by Absolute Meaning.

He loves each of us with an unwearied and everlasting love.

He loves us.

And when we glimpse this truth, our eyes are opened at last to the reality that He has guided us through every moment of our lives, even through our mistakes and failures, and that they have all lead us to NOW, closer to Him.

This is what love does. Love draws us.

~ from His Suffering and Ours