“The joy I feel in being with you is no less great than that which I felt when I was with My Son Jesus during His mortal life” (Father’s Message to Sr. Eugenia Ravasio).
Our Father never tires of expressing His love to us in a thousand ways, until we finally believe in it and reciprocate His love.
Could He make a more beautiful declaration of love than to tell us that His joy in being with us is equal to the joy He experienced when He was with His beloved Son?
Why is it that sometimes it is not easy for us to be certain of this love and to constantly renew our strength in it?
If we look at it from the beginning, it could be one of the consequences of the fall into original sin, when we lost that familiar and trusting relationship with our Father. A false image of God also arose in us, in accordance with what the fallen angel intended to convey in his temptation: God wants to deprive us of something that is good and desirable (cf. Gen 3:1-5). However, this is a complete inversion of reality.
We have probably also lived difficult experiences in a world darkened by sin, which make access to a loving Father difficult. Some wounds may have dug very deeply into our lives… But all of this can be healed if we immerse ourselves in the Word of God. Indeed, the whole of Scripture bears witness to God’s love for us, which was manifested especially in the coming of His Son into the world and in all that He did for us. The Son reveals to us the love of the Father!
We know that Jesus always did the Will of the Father (cf. Jn 6:38). The affirmation we hear today from the Father’s Message, that His joy in being among us is no less than that which He experienced accompanying His Son Jesus, gives us deep peace and security. At the same time, it can become an incentive for us to strive each day to show ourselves worthy of God’s love by imitating His beloved Son.
In this way, God’s joy for us becomes a constant source of grace that we can pass on to others.