Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Because it's never a bad time for St. Francis


“The enemy often tries to make us attempt and start many projects so that we will be overwhelmed with too many tasks, and therefore achieve nothing and leave everything unfinished. Sometimes he evens suggests the wish to undertake some excellent work that he foresees we will never accomplish. This is to distract us from the prosecution of some less excellent work that we would have easily completed. He does not care how many plans and beginnings we make, provided nothing is finished. No more than Pharaoh does he wish to prevent ‘the mystical women of Israel’ – that is, Christian souls – from bringing forth male children, provided they are slain before they grow up.
            “On the contrary, as the great St. Jerome says, ‘Among Christians it is not so much the beginning as the end that counts.’ We must not swallow so much food that we cannot digest what we have taken. The spirit of the seducer holds us down to mere starts and keeps us content with a flowery springtime. The Spirit of God makes us consider beginnings only so as to arrive at the end, and makes us rejoice in the flowers of the spring only in expectation of enjoying the fruits of summer and autumn.”
            -St. Francis de Sales, from Finding God’s Will for You

2 comments:

Amber said...

I love that quote, it gets me every time. I read it to my kids this morning, thanks for posting it!

Jessica Snell said...

Oh, good!

Yeah, I was just putting some new quotations in my "quotations" document (where I save the good ones) and saw this again and couldn't help posting it. Because it gets me every time, too. :)