"Helped Up" and Healed by the Love of Jesus
- SERVANT OF GOD ELISABETH LESEUR
Firmer resolution to maintain a deep inner stability and to accept the waves of difficulties, agitation, and confusions that, though caused by my health, do not touch the depths, as well as painful disappointments caused by some people.
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To love those who have betrayed my confidence and made me suffer, or at least to forgive them fully. Not to project onto others my own faults but to accept the humiliation of having given my confidence too quickly. For the future, without discouragement or bitterness, to be very prudent in regard to work and new connections, and in all things to observe the greatest moderation. To be loving to all, but not to let everyone enter into my heart too easily. To respond to an attraction only when I have solidly tested it, and yet to be kind to all. Never to compromise with ideas and principles, and yet to be completely tolerant of those who differ most from me in their point of view. To maintain, by prayer and daily effort, integrity of will and moral energy in spite of the oppression and failure caused by poor health. ...
When I look back in spite of suffering and tears, I can only bless and adore. I begin this new period of life—long or short, peaceful or sorrowful, according to God's will with these words from my depths: I believe, I adore, I hope. I want to be Christian to the core and to be transformed by grace. This year I will accept and offer to God for others and for the Church the difficulty of external distraction and distress, which aggravates pain. ...
To live a life of work and action, in an atmosphere of faith, with Felix, surrounded by friends and family—that is my dream. ... And yet I must say in all humility how hard it is for me to make the necessary effort and how I suffer through my life, which is too fragmented for my taste and into which no glimmer of faith or consolation comes from outside. Perhaps that is why God has made himself everything to me—why he has taken care of all of my needs and accomplished everything in me. ... May God help me to accomplish my resolutions and give me his grace! May he do a little good through me!
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Acknowledgement
Elisabeth Leseur. "'Helped Up' and Healed by the Love of Jesus," from Elisabeth Leseur: Selected Writings. Paulist Press, Inc. (2005).
Printed in the January 2024 edition of Magnificat. Used with permission.
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The Author
Elisabeth Leseur († 1914) was a French laywoman whose atheist husband, upon reading her spiritual journal after her death, experienced a profound conversion and later became a Dominican priest. She is the author of Elisabeth Leseur: Selected Writings and The Secret Diary of Elisabeth Leseur: The Woman Whose Goodness Changed Her Husband from Atheist to Priest.
