If you are willing to bear in peace the trial of not being pleased with yourself, you will be offering the Lord Jesus a home in your heart. It is true you will suffer, for you will feel like a stranger in your own house. But do not fear, for the poorer you are, the more Christ will love you.
We are always consoled by these words of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux; she reminds us that Jesus' power is made perfect in our weakness. God does not want our virtue, he wants our weakness. Even as we try to please him, we see and understand that we always come up short. Jesus is not a coach. He wants us to go to him in our poverty.
This requires courage, humility, and quite often a good deal of embarrassment as perhaps we realize that we are not the spiritual athletes we imagined ourselves to be and are not making much progress in the spiritual life (as if such a thing were desirable in the first place.) It's all about Jesus' mercy. All I can offer him is my poverty and weakness. This delights Our Lord. Not because he wants to put us down, but because he delights to console and strengthen and transform our hearts into hearts of flesh, not hearts of stone, hearts full of love and compassion, hearts as broken as his own.
