A Spiritual Reading Mashup

The other day I was sitting on the couch somewhat out of sorts, lamenting still that things shouldn't be different. Tears came to my eyes and I looked up and saw a moth silhouette inside the lamp shade which looked like a heart to me. Then I turned at random in St. Faustina's diary and read:

"My daughter, why are you weeping? After all, you yourself offered to undertake these sufferings."

It was true. Several weeks ago I offered a little prayer to Jesus at Mass, "Jesus, I trust in you. Whatever suffering you have for me, I accept." But, you see, a promise and valiant effort made in the spirit of consolation feels different when you begin to actually experience the suffering. I wanted to take my mind off of this, so I opened my Nook and got a little urge to begin reading The Secret Diary of Elizabeth Leseur which I haven't picked up in almost a year. There was this passage for me:

"It is a suffering sent from God which I offer to Him, that among all the beloved friends surrounding me, I should have no one to whom I might open my heart in saying to him or her, "Look," and who might understand and help me. But perhaps to hear one's own ideas and beliefs perpetually criticized, to know them misunderstood, to have prejudice and ignorance against one, is to some extent to suffer persecution for justice's sake."

Several days passed and I was thinking about the same sufferings again. I got an urge to read Interior Castle and this one hit me right over the head:

"And yet they become restless, for they cannot do as they would like to and control their feelings all at once. Yet oh, dear me! Are these not the same persons who some time ago were meditating upon how the Lord suffered, and upon what a good thing it is to suffer, and who were even desiring to suffer?"

Whomp! That was a sound of some books hitting me in the head. I constantly have to remind myself that my expectations easily go askew and I start behaving as though God owes me something. Nope! I gotta be like the lady with the hemorrhage, grateful to touch the the merest hem of his cloak.