List of points

“You are all so cheerful, and one doesn’t expect that,” I heard someone say.

It has been happening for a long time; insistently and with diabolical determination, Christ’s enemies never tire of complaining that the people who give themselves to God are all sullen. And, unfortunately, some of those who wish to be ‘good’ have lent support to those words, with their ‘sad virtues’.

—We give you thanks, Lord, because you have chosen to count on our cheerful, very happy lives to erase that false caricature.

—I also ask You that we may not forget it.

May no one read sadness or sorrow in your face, when you spread in the world around you the sweet aroma of your sacrifice: the children of God should always be sowers of peace and joy.

The cheerfulness of a man of God, of a woman of God, has to overflow: it has to be calm, contagious, attractive…; in a few words, it has to be so supernatural, and natural, so infectious that it may bring others to follow Christian ways.

“Happy?” —The question made me think.

—Words have not yet been invented to express all that we feel — in the heart and in the will — when we know ourselves to be children of God.

Christmas time. You write: “Together with the holy expectation of Mary and Joseph, I also impatiently await the Child. How happy I shall feel at Bethlehem! I have a feeling that I won’t be able to contain this joy without bounds. Yes! but, with Him, I also want to be born anew.”

—I hope you really mean what you say!

Some people feel embittered all the time. Everything makes them uneasy. They go to sleep with a physical obsession: that this sleep, the only possible escape, is not going to last very long. They wake up with the unwelcome and disheartening feeling that they now have another day in front of them.

Many have forgotten that the Lord has placed us in the world on our way to eternal happiness. They do not realise that only those who walk on earth with the joy of the children of God will be able to attain it.

You are extraordinarily happy. Sometimes you may find out that God has been abandoned by a son of his. Then, in the midst of the peace and joy deep within you, you feel a pang of grief and a sorrow which arises from affection, but you do not allow it really to disturb or upset you.

—All right, but… make sure you use all human and supernatural resources available to help him change his mind And you must trust fully in Jesus Christ! If you do, the waters will return to their course.