Seeds

"My chief care should not be to find pleasure or success, health or life or money or rest or even things like virtue and wisdom-still less their opposites, pain, failure, sickness, death.  But in all that happens, my one desire and one joy should be to know:  Here is the thing that God has willed for me.  In this His love is found, and in accepting this I can give back His love to Him and give myself with it to Him.  For in giving myself I shall find Him and He is life everlasting.  By consenting to His will with joy and doing it with gladness I have His love in my heart, because my will is now the same as His love and I am on the way to becoming what He is, Who is Love.  And by accepting all things from Him I recieve his joy into my soul, not because things are what they are but because God is who He is, and His love has willed my joy in them all"  -Thomas Merton