The Madness of Humiliation

Dear Jesus: if I have to be an apostle, you will need to make me very humble.

Everything the sun touches is bathed in light. Lord, fill me with your clarity, make me share in your divinity so that I may identify my will with your adorable Will and become the instrument you wish me to be. Give me the madness of the humiliation you underwent, which led you to be born poor, to work in obscurity, to the shame of dying sewn with nails to a piece of wood, to your self-effacement in the Blessed Sacrament.

—May I know myself: may I know myself and know you. I will then never lose sight of my nothingness.

Furrow - Josemaria Escriva

Much of what the world's desires is designed to prop up one's ego. We are not even satisfied with how we appear to each other. We have to have the latest fashions and whiter teeth. We spend so much time on useless worldly things that say and reinforce one of two things "I am important" or" I need to be more important," instead of focusing on the eternal, we focus on the expedient. If you believe in Jesus Christ but yet invest most of your time in the trappings and allurements of the secular world, things that are designed to give glory to you or to someone other than God, you are cheating God, you are worse than a non-believer. The only way to Jesus Christ is through the Cross. The only way to the Cross is through humility. When you carry all the things that glitter and fill your pockets with the material life, you have nothing left, no strength to carry the Cross.