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The love of Jesus Christ that leads to his willing embrace of the crucified earthly destiny that appeared before him is both a model for how we are called to love and a revelation of God’s self-offering of control out of love. This model for how you and I are to love is not an invitation to masochism or some sort of foolhardy and dangerous behavior. Instead, it is an example of our willingness to accept both the suffering and the joy that comes with love. This revelation of God’s self-offering or sacrifice of control tells us a great deal about who Jesus Christ is and what God is like.

Solitude is truthful and often delightful, even when painful. Loneliness is a hell made up of the illusion of separateness.

Jesus’ thirst was not so much for water, but for the encounter with a parched soul. Jesus needed to encounter the Samaritan woman in order to open her heart. The outcome of that encounter by the well was the woman’s transformation. She had gone to draw water from the well, but she found another kind of water, the living water of mercy from which gushes forth eternal life. 

When we realize that the road we have been following may not be the one that is best for us, we must have the humility to admit that we have strayed, that we have been mistaken, that God knows better than we the life that will lead us to him. Nothing is more difficult than admitting that we have failed, that we have sinned. We feel haunted by the past. No matter how willing we are to do penance and suffer and take on the heavy burden of our guilt, in the end the greatest humility is accepting the role the Lord has written for us.