“Rach you’ve changed…” I ‘ve heard people say to me. And this is because the Lord hit me with a ton of bricks and once you see the Truth, you can’t unsee it, you can’t unknow it, and what it does is it forces you to change.
What the Lord revealed to me was His divine love for me, but not in a way that you would think, “God loves me therefore I’m perfect the way I am”, but rather “God loves me therefore something great is required of me because of this love.” And that “something great” is sacrifice. My one English teacher in HS used to say that word so much. It was like he had just discovered this word and was fanatical about it, or maybe he was going through a change of heart himself and was understanding what it means to follow the Lord: he saw the Truth and couldn't unsee it.
We all know that when we give something away, it makes us feel good inside. We’ve all experienced this feeling. It can be addicting even, filling a need deep within. What this is is fulfilling something inside of us that satisfies us because we were always called to a greater good, and what that actually requires is sacrifice. It would seem like I’m contradicting myself to say the act of giving away satisfies us while simultaneously lays ourselves down, in that, in the act of giving something away, we destroy some part of the ego, the self. And this is sacrifice: a death to self.
When you look at the evil in the world, the hatred in the world, the murders, the anger, the power, the greed, the abuse, the wars, you ask yourself, “But what can stop this?” And the answer is this: goodness comes only when sacrifice is made such that when you see people doing good in the world, it is only because and can only be because a sacrifice was made somewhere. Giving something away had to happen for a good thing to exist.
And so it not in loving ourselves that good things happen. It is in giving away something of and/or in ourselves that brings about a good. And this is sacrifice. So when Truth is revealed to you, you are asked to serve either the greater good or the lesser good that is yourself. And in making that choice, you can either perpetuate evil or perpetuate goodness. If you choose the latter, you will change. You will be different and over time, people will notice and they might say to you “You’ve changed.”Because some part of you has died as it must so that the void in that death may be filled with the life of grace that you were created for.
This is the Christian life. The burden that is ours as mortals is this: that we lay ourselves down over and over and over again until we take our last breath. And when we have been purified by the Fire of Grace, then shall we be FULLY changed to satisfy the Divine Justice and Righteousness of our Master, praise be Jesus Christ.