Reflection

(Found here)

“The new year always makes us yearn for the ‘new’—and when we say ‘new’ we mean a fresh start. Yet this desire often blots out what God has already given us. Instead . . . take a look this new year at what God has given you in the last. Even in your trials and sins, God reveals to you where your desires are, helping you see you: the person he wishes to draw to himself, the person he created as good. This self-knowledge is necessary for purifying those desires, so that you can bear the name of Jesus, the one ‘you seek when you dream of happiness’ (John Paul II).”
~Thomas Nee

“It is Jesus in fact that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be grounded down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”

~Pope John Paul II