90 Days to Love

For the past 90 days I have been reading and following Magnify, which is a book by Kaylene Brown that guides women in a 90 day commitment to prayer, fasting, and mortification. Each week the book highlights a virtue and a female saint. In following these female saints and discovering how they lived out the virtues, coupled with living a more ascetic life, the past 90 days have served to peel back the layers of self-love that have been keeping me from God, as well as inspire me to step out into a new life with Christ.

The journey has no doubt been tough and yet I have experienced so many graces in the midst of it all. One of the major fruits I experienced is the realization that in striving for holiness, I have been so focused on fixing myself, that I have forgotten to just rest in the Father’s love for me. I have forgotten how to surrender my weaknesses, to accept them in a sense, and to simply fall into the arms of my Heavenly Father. This childlike trust in God is our ultimate end. We must learn to trust God like a little child trusts his father and mother, so that we may be ready to enter the Heavenly Kingdom with Him when we die. All of life on this earth is pointing to this end and thus all of life is a preparation for that day. The more we learn to surrender our lives to the Lord, the closer we will walk with Him from this life to the next.

In life, we can tend to focus on the checkbox list of things that we have accomplished. Through Magnify, I have been able to better understand that it is not so much about the prayers, mortifications and fasting, but it is more about the love with which we do these things. Each day is intentional by the praying and offering up all of your mortifications and fasting for one particular person. I made a list of prayer intentions before I started and it was amazing to see how the timing of these prayers for some people came at a much needed time in their life.

Although it wasn’t all of the time that I was able to see these fruits, and yet what I learned in that was how to trust in the Lord even when my prayers seemed to have no effect. The offering up of our prayers for a specific person can end up being an exercise in trust, building us up in faith and training us in hope. The effects of our prayers are often hidden from us, which we must believe is only for our good. We should thank Jesus often for the souls He saves through our prayers and sacrifices that we do not see. This is a true act of faith. To believe in the effects of our prayers, even when we cannot see them. More often than not, the miracles we experience in our lives gradually unfold, which requires continual faith on our part.

Jesus shows us the way in all things. His cross and resurrection are the pinnacle of our faith and the center of all creation. Jesus was not a slave who was forced to die for the Father, He was a Son who loved the Father so much, that He laid down His life in obedience to the Father’s will. I have often wondered, who all am I willing to lay down my own life for? Definitely my family and close friends, but what about my enemies, what about those who persecute me, what about those who would try to kill me? And yet, this is what Jesus did. His one sacrificial act of love from the cross stands at the center of all time and space.

We imitate Christ’s love from the cross each time we lay down our self-love, our sinful habits, and our selfishness. In doing this, we are uniting ourselves to the Crucified Jesus just as St Paul writes about in his letter to the Colossians when he says, “I am rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” This one moment of salvation history, Christ’s death on the cross, is the central moment of all of creation. In some mysterious way, we all live suspend within that moment, past, present and future. So by uniting our suffering with Jesus in the here and now of the time, we enter more fully into that one central moment of salvation where God reigns.

What a blessing! What hope we have in our suffering!

So often we reflect upon how much Jesus loved the Father from the cross; He willingly died for loved the Father. In this, Jesus demonstrates the greatest act of love, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). Less often do we recognize how much the Father loved the Son. The image of this post is a beautiful depiction of both Jesus’ love for the Father and the Father’s love for Jesus. The most striking thing about this image to me is this loving gaze between the Father and the Son. The cross was both a self-sacrificial gift of love from Jesus to the Father, but it was also a gift of love from the Father to the Son. The cross gave Jesus the gift of being able to redeem all of humanity.

Many times I think of my crosses as heavy burdens. Sometimes I even fall under the weight of them. I have been encouraged as of late to see them as a loving gift from the Father, who never abandons us, but who comforts us and lifts us up in our crosses. God the Father has hand picked my particular crosses just for me because He knows that they are what will lead me to holiness. I can, of my own free will, choose to deny my crosses, or I can carry them along with Christ.

Where Jesus leads us in carrying the cross is always through death to the resurrection. We cannot have the resurrection without first dying to our own sin and selfishness. Our crosses can be seen as a gift once we realize that we cannot enter Heaven without being completely purified. I say this not to lead you to despair, but to encourage you along the way. No matter what your cross, Jesus is right there with you. You are in good company as you take that next step, do that next right thing, in your journey. God doesn’t ask us to have it all figured out, but He does ask us to choose love now, always in obedience to His will.

By reading the lives of the saints, we can see that they all follow this same way of Jesus. The saints have all died to their own will in order to do the will of the Father. Each saint has been called to a particular way of uniting themselves to the Father’s will. Each one’s mission is unique to their own set of gifts and talents, so that the building up of the Kingdom of God may be complete on earth as it is in Heaven through the Mystical Body of Christ. We too have a particular path set out for us by the Father. It is our life’s work to discover our purpose, and then to be ready to lay down our own plans and desires in order to do the will of the Father. This is the path to true and everlasting happiness.

For me, participating in Magnify stripped away all of my comforts, which left my soul completely bare and vulnerable. There were many days at the beginning of the 90 days where I felt very agitated and unsettled. What I finally came to understand was that Jesus was completely vulnerable on the cross. He surrendered all to the Father and in that vulnerability He simply loved. We too can choose to love in our vulnerability. It is the greatest gift we have from the Father, to choose Him, to choose love, despite our circumstances. The enemy knows that we are weakest when our soul is bared, but it is at these times that we can know that Jesus is closest to us. Jesus shows us the way through the cross to the resurrection. We must continue to hope in the promises of God, despite how we are feeling.

The Sacred Triduum is at the center of all of creation. It is a time to enter into the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. It is also a time to remember the great love by which the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father. It is a time to reflect upon our own weaknesses and our need for God’s healing. It is a time to prepare our hearts for the great gift eternal life by allowing God to peel away another layer of self-love from us, so that we may bare our souls ever more, and unite ourselves more fully with the Heavenly Father. I pray you have a Blessed Triduum!