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