THE HONOR OF BEING CHILDREN OF GOD

“Call Him Father many times a day and tell Him – alone, in your heart – that you love Him, that you adore Him: that you feel the pride and the strength of being His child” (St. Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer).

It’s not as if our Father doesn’t know that we love Him and that we want to love Him more and more. He certainly does! So why should we tell Him?

That is part of the mystery of love…

Didn’t Jesus Himself want to hear from Peter that he loved Him (Jn 21:15-17)? Don’t lovers always whisper to each other: “I love you”? Don’t couples who have been together for a long time do this to reassure themselves that they still love each other?

It is part of the tenderness of our relationship with our Father that we express our love to Him again and again. Isn’t Father’s message to Mother Eugenia full of declarations of God’s love for us?

Expressing our love to our Father, again and again and more and more deeply, creates in us a reality that connects us more and more to Him every day and makes this love of ours more beautiful and more mature. It will also help us to accept with greater ease the difficult stages of our life and will impel us to practice works of charity.

The following advice of St. Josemaría is also very helpful and corresponds to what our Father asks of us in His message to Sister Eugenia: that we honor Him as He deserves and that we consider our divine sonship as a great honor and a choice of His goodness.

This awareness becomes for us a life-giving source of joy in God, and thus we come closer to St. Paul’s exhortation: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice” (Phil 4:4).