can you ask God to break your heart

“Prayer is the best armor we have,
it is the key which opens the heart of God.”
St. Padre Pio

(a beautiful rose / Julie Cook / 2021)

“May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.”
Mother Teresa

Yesterday I made mention that prayer is about the only thing we all truly have..
the only real lifeline that remains…

And so as I was reading that quote about prayer by Mother Teresa, I
had to ask myself…could I pray that prayer?
Could I ask that big question…would I be willing,
like Mother Teresa, to ask that God break my heart so completely
that the world may fall in?

Am I willing to let go of self, my life, my world…
so much so that I could pray that God would break me, allowing Him
to flow into my entire being?
Am I willing to let go and let God?

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord,
plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.
Jeremiah 29:11

read, preach, defend

“The harm that comes to souls from the lack of reading holy books makes me shudder…
What power spiritual reading has to lead to a change of course,
and to make even worldly people enter into the way of perfection.”
St. Padre Pio

(a willet and a pair of piping plovers in the surf /Rosemary Beach, FL / Julie Cook / 2019)

“For it is our plain duty to preach and defend the truth in a straightforward way.
Those who are to stumble must stumble, rather than the heirs of grace should not hear.
While we offend and alienate one man, we secure another;
if we drive one man further the wrong way, we drive another further the right way.
The cause of truth, the heavenly company of saints, gains on the whole more in one way than in the other.”
Bl. John Henry Newman, p. 25
An Excerpt From
Quotable Newman

hope for us all…

“Where there is no obedience there is no virtue,
where there is no virtue there is no good,
where there is no good there is no love,
where there is no love, there is no God,
and where there is no God there is no Paradise.”
St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina

(a willet shorebird / Rosemary Beach, Fl / Julie Cook / 2019)

Recognition that lost periods of a life can never be returned can provoke
an intense desire to give completely to God what is yet remaining in a life.
The soul scarred by former sin is sometimes, after grace, the soul that will give without reserve.
It is not at all an exaggeration to affirm that great sinners often do become hidden saints.
Fr. Donald Haggerty
from Conversion