Compared to God , everything else is nothing!
I observe that instead of finding our rest in the one who created everything, we tend to fill our hearts with lesser things, and they cannot satisfy us. Compared to God, the whole of creation is like a tiny nut – next to nothing.
I see that God is to us everything that’s good and comforting: he’s our clothing, lovingly wrapping, embracing, and enclosing us for the sake of tender love. Truly he can never leave us, being for us everything that’s good, as I understand it.
Also at this time God showed me a little thing the size of a hazel nut in the palm of my hand, and it was so round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and thought: What could this be? And the answer came to me: ” This is everything that is made.”
I was amazed that it could last, for it seemed so small that it might suddenly have disappeared into nothingness. Then I was answered in my understanding: “It lasts, and it shall always last, because God loves it. And so everything has its existence through the love of God.”
In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it; the second, that God loves it; the third, that God preserves it.
We must recognize the littleness of created things, and to consider as nothing everything that’s created, in order to love and have God, who is uncreated. For this is the reason we aren’t fully at ease in our heart and soul: we seek our true rest in these things that are so little, in which rest can’t be found, while failing to know our God, who is almighty, all-wise, all-good. He is true Rest.
God desires to be known, and it pleases him when we rest in him: for anything less than God won’t satisfy us. For this reason, no soul can be at rest until it’s emptied of all created things. Only when the soul counts all creation as nothing for the sake of loving the one who is everything, can it receive spiritual rest.
With what things other than God do I sometimes fill my heart? In the end, can these things satisfy me? However good they may be in themselves, will they last forever?
My almighty, all-wise, all-good Father: If I should gain everything except you, I would have nothing: and if I should lose everything except you, I would still have everything.
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