Guardian angel spiritual protection from the day of birth

Tag: opportunity

  • Being a Christian on the spiritual path to happiness

    Being a Christian means believing in Jesus and following his teaching. It is not that complicated, there are no manuals to study to understand where the essence of Christianity lies. Being a Christian and therefore believing in God basically means doing two things.

    Love God
    Love others, everyone, without exclusions.

    Being a Christian means trusting in God

    I am sure we are part of a grand plan – God’s divine plan for each of us. We are like pieces of a puzzle, each one is indispensable and unique, has its own place, and serves to complete this divine plan.

    Trusting in God’s will means starting to think of yourself as a fundamental part of his divine plan. It also means believing that everything will be for the best.

    One of the most important phrases to inspire us is the one in which Jesus explains that not even a sparrow can die without God willing it. Nothing happens without God’s permission.

    Believing in him means believing that everything, however difficult and complex, is part of his divine plan. A father who loves his son wants the best for him, wants him to be happy.

    But a father who truly loves his son knows that he will not really give him love if he accepts every whim or every request. As well as avoiding any difficulty, he would make him weak and unable to face the challenges of life.

    A father who loves his son wants to protect him and wants him happy. But he knows that not everything his son asks him will be really helpful and positive.

    God is a father who loves us totally. He wants our good and our happiness. And He knows what is really best for our life and our happiness. If I asked you to tell me what will happen in the next 24 hours, you would not be able to answer me with certainty.

    Neither you nor me or anyone else know the future. You don’t know what’s going to happen in 20 minutes, it’s hard for you to know for sure what’s best for you for the next 10 and 20 years.

    Believing in God, therefore, means accepting everything he has in store for us, facing every challenge with certain certainties. If God allows it, it will still be for the best, you have nothing to fear.

    God loves you and wants you to be happy

    He will always give you the strength you need to face and solve any problem. Accepting does not mean suffering, every challenge is an opportunity to act.

    It makes no sense to reject what happens to us or to think it unfair, God has allowed it, there will be an excellent reason. Focus on living this challenge in the best way.

    Some things we will find difficult to understand and accept, and everyone looks for an explanation, a meaning.

    Some events are really difficult to accept and understand. I think of death, illness, or cruelty that we hear about or that we sometimes experience.

    Some will tell you that they are tests that God uses to verify how much we really trust Him. Others that they are punishments to let you know that you are wrong and allow you to change.

    If I want to get strong, I have to train, if I’m wrong, a punishment could make me understand.

    I say maybe because I can’t know what God really has in mind. But I see it from a different perspective, I consider them opportunities.

    Every moment we find ourselves making choices, it is part of our nature. Sometimes they are as trivial as deciding what clothes to wear, what to eat, or which way to go.

    Other times they concern about how we will react in the face of injustice, what we will say in a trial, whether to give birth to a child. I think that every choice is always an opportunity, the opportunity to love.

    Being a Christian is believing in God, therefore, means accepting reality with confidence. With the conviction that He will always give us the strength to solve every problem, and choosing to take this great opportunity.

  • Spiritual Retreats Suspension of Daily Stress

    Spiritual retreats represent an often unique opportunity to experience a parenthesis distant from technological digital interconnections. Because spirituality is not a fad. If you are already imagining the mystical silence within the four walls of a convent, know that it is not only this that is spoken today when referring to spiritual retreats.

    Alongside traditional Catholic-style initiatives, there are many other types of spiritual paths that are offered to post-modern men today. These draw above all from the New Age area, from Buddhist meditation and from initiatives derived from these also offering secular ways, independent of creeds or religious confessions, to cultivate one’s spirituality.

    So whether you are in a prayer group among the most traditional walls of a convent, or that you find yourself immersed in nature meditating silently in front of the Buddha statue, or that you still participate in a spiritual growth group for the rediscovery of your Child Inside, some of the psychological benefits that you can get from these very different forms of spiritual retreats are much more similar than you might think.

    A first aspect not to underestimate the benefits of spiritual retreats is that of representing an unrepeatable pause from all that postmodernity and technology today represents for us. And we’re not talking about a little healthy rest. Spiritual retreats offer our mind an opportunity to enter into a space-time dimension that is suspended and distant from everyday life, in which it is the contact with our interiority that is privileged concerning the relationship with the outside.

    The mobile phones are switched off, there are no car or urban traffic noises, often time passes in absolute silence; when most of the stresses that generally come from outside are missing, then we have the space to bring attention to ourselves; only in this way is it possible to regain contact with our most spiritual and contemplative part.

    This suspension from the rhythms of everyday life may not be easy since we are so used to being constantly bombarded with information, inputs, and requests of any kind that our ability to concentrate is now dependent on this continuous multitasking. But in this constantly hyper-connected and digitized world, real ties to people or a reference community often fail.

    In this sense, spiritual retreats offer another benefit for post-modern man: the sense of belonging to a community, to the group of people with whom one shares a significant experience that creates a bond. Praying or meditating are activities that can be experienced very differently if they are practiced alone or in a group, silence and recollection become the silence and recollection of the group and not only of the individual, and this amplifies a sense of connection with the others with a supra-personal and spiritual dimension.