God’s experience and spiritual freedom

Experience of God

If you have experienced God, surely your life has been marked by him. They were intense days, when you discovered love, but also affliction. It is an experience similar to when you begin to love a person: it seems to you that life is colored and your eyes open to a reality never experienced; love produces positive fruits within you, but also leads you to discover suffering, to become aware that you will have to make even radical decisions, which you will have to change yourself and your way of acting.

If you have known God, you will have discovered that you can actually meet Him, you can listen to His voice that guides you, opens your eyes, manifests His Love, and makes you finally feel loved. Over time, however, you will find that He acts seriously, He wants to deepen friendship with you and He wants to enter into your relationships, your work, every time of your day in order to love, heal and free you. You will find that His desire is to surrender you completely to Him. It will soon seem easy to you, but you will soon discover that you will first have to deal with yourself, with the attachment to your vices and the affection you have for your sins; then you will instinctively raise a barrier not to let him into your life.

It seems paradoxical to you, but sins and defects are part of the certainties you rely on. You have always acted in the same way, with the same dynamics and with the same sins in the same situations. You produce them because you want them to happen, and you design them, even unconsciously, because of your wounds, your mentality, your character. All this will continue until you surrender yourself totally to Him.

Think carefully, then, how to surrender yourself to God, because to give yourself means to entrust yourself, that is, to have total confidence to let yourself be guided by renouncing your will, means to become vulnerable from the human point of view, means to die to yourself to let God guide your future.

We must declare to God: "make of me what you have in mind and, when you see in me obstacles or resistances to your project, provide, cut, annihilate my defects". In words it is easy, but when the Lord acts in you you will feel afraid, because you want to have everything under control and you do not want to deprive yourself of your freedom or, better, of what you believe is freedom but instead is the slavery of your vices and defects. We must therefore persevere: "do not listen to me when I ask you, O Lord, to stop you, continue to work in me: I am sure that what you do will be for my good".

Jesus himself reassures you: "Whoever remains united in me and I in him, bears much fruit, because without me you can do nothing". The branches, that is, the faithful disciples of Jesus, will bear much fruit by imitating his qualities. What will happen instead to those who will not remain united to Jesus and will not bear fruit? Jesus says: "Whoever does not remain in me is thrown away, and then they collect him and throw him into the fire and burn him". On the other hand he assures: "If you remain united to me and my words remain in you, ask for what you want and it will be given to you".

The example comes from the Saints: everything they did was humanly impossible because above their strength, but they overcame their own humanity because they remained in God. Look at their example and you will understand what you have to do: everything they have done you can do it too, in your simplicity.

Who knows God changes his life because he has an experience of Love; this is the love that makes you open your eyes and allows you to see your sins, to call them by your own name and perceive the urgency of eliminating them, breaking every chain that binds you to lusts and asking God for help.

Ours is a mediocre life when we do not know how to love: what is the use of gaining the whole world, but losing one’s soul? If you experience God, you change the way you think about life, because you follow the thought of God that comes from his word. But are you ready to be a docile instrument in his hands, even if gripped by suffering? Are you ready to stand up and walk in faith?

We can have everything, but if we do not have God we cannot be happy: God is really our hope and this is a certainty that we can bring into the whole world. God can heal our wounds even the deepest, he will make us feel even stronger - precisely in suffering - his love that will give birth to the urge to love in our turn. It is striking to read in the Acts of the Apostles what the union, faith and love of the first Christian communities was: "They were assiduous in listening to the teaching of the apostles and in fraternal union, in the breaking of bread and in prayer.

A sense of fear was in all and wonders and signs occurred by the work of the apostles. All those who had become believers stood together and held everything in common; those who had properties and substances sold them and were part of them all, according to the need of each. Every day together they attended the temple and broke bread at home, taking meals with gladness and simplicity of heart, praising God and enjoying the sympathy of all the people.
(Acts 2, 42-47)

United, in His name, we will let ourselves be overwhelmed and led by His Love and nothing, however difficult or suffered, will be impossible.