What up until now seemed to me like obstacles, such as temptations, distractions, internal and external difficulties, will now serve as helps to me. When earlier, instead of rising, I always fell deeper through my sins, faults, and weaknesses, I just stayed there. I did not know how to make use of my failings. Now, however, I see that with the grace of God that “fall” can be used to raise me so much more surely to God, and bring me to my goal…what might previously have been a hindrance and source of discouragement to my efforts can now serve as the means for raising me up from creatures to their Creator. In all of this I now recognize a pressing invitation of God to unite myself as closely as possible with him through acts of faith, trust, selfgiving, and love. And so everything discouraging is for me a pure grace, which enables and invites me to live more and act more through God and in God. 

Haste, fearful self-consciousness, and distraction have till now so often influenced and ruled my life. From now on, however, I shall live with a spirit of trust and of pure abandonment to God’s all-knowing and all gracious providence. Before, nothing so depressed and worried me as my failings and weaknesses, but now I boast of them in the spirit of contrition. “I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me” (2 Cor 12:9). They should help to convince me of the nothingness of my own ego and move me to let myself be completely filled by Christ, insofar as through the awakening of faith, confidence, and love I unite myself more and more intimately with God. The feelings and desires of the old man must die out. “He must increase, but I must decrease—Illum oportet crescere, me autem minui” (Jn 3:30). The more I recede, the more will he grow. 

So little by little I will overcome the unforeseen occurrences of life and the petty things of this world and master them. All of my former enemies are now helpful to me in moving me closer to my ideal, and they serve to push me towards ever greater faithfulness and generosity and to trust that is ever more intimate  –A. Carthusian ‘Life in God’s Presence’