Keep Jogging?
In an early account of the life of St Jane Frances de Chantal, we find her speaking to her sisters of the Visitation about the love of God. God, she assures them, yearns to pour it out on us. But we, in order to receive it, must be ready. This requires on our part an ‘unconditional consent’ to God’s design, a complete and irrevocable surrender of self ‘from the moment we give ourselves up wholeheartedly to God until the moment we die’, a sacrifice quite as real as that of the martyrs. She commented: ‘But this goes for generous hearts and people who keep faith with love and don’t take back their offering; our Lord doesn’t take the trouble to make martyrs of feeble hearts and people who have little love and not much constancy; he just lets them jog along in their own little way in case they give up and slip from his hands altogether; he never forces our free will.’ This prospect faces me with an immense choice to be made each moment: will I spend my Christian life just pottering along with a divided heart, a divided love, making forays into the woods of self-will, or will I wholeheartedly follow the One who calls, really desiring to be with him where he is?
