On very many occasions we will hear the Holy Spirit: Start again..., be constant, no matter the recent failure, no matter all the previous negative experiences together..., start again with more humility, asking for more help from your Lord.
In the human, genius is usually the fruit of prolonged patience, of ceaselessly repeated and endlessly improved effort. "The wise man repeats his calculations and renews his experiences, modifying them until he finds the object of his research. The writer retouches his work twenty times. The sculptor breaks one after the other his attempts until they express his inner creation..... All human creations are the fruit of a perpetual starting over ". In the supernatural, our love for the Lord is not so much manifested in the successes we believe we have achieved as in the capacity to begin again, to renew the interior struggle.
Spiritual mediocrity, lukewarmness, is, on the contrary, the abandonment and neglect of our purposes and goals of inner life. On the path that leads to God, "to sleep is to die ". Discouragement, which always carries within itself a point of pride and excessive self-confidence, leads to the abandonment of the purposes and goals that the Holy Spirit suggested one day in the intimacy of the heart.
Often, progress in the interior life comes after failures, perhaps unexpected, to which we react with humility and a firmer desire to follow the Lord. It has rightly been said that perseverance does not consist in never falling, but in always getting up. "When a soldier who is fighting receives some wound or falls back a little, no one is so fastidious or so ignorant of the things of war that he thinks that this is a crime. The only ones who do not receive wounds are those who do not fight; those who throw themselves most ardently against the enemy are the ones who receive the blows "
Let us ask Our Lady for the grace to never abandon our inner struggle, even if our previous experience is sad and catastrophic, and for the grace and humility to always begin again.
Let us also ask Our Lady today to be constant in our apostolate, even if apparently we do not see any fruit. One day, perhaps when we are already in her presence, the Lord will make us contemplate the fruits of an apostolate that at times seemed sterile to us, and that was always effective. The seed that is sown always bears fruit: one, a hundred; another, sixty; another, thirty... Much fruit for a single seed.
Hablar con Dios