Today's reading in One Month to Live suggests that some kinds of conflict are good because of how our character is shaped for the better because of them!

We can sometimes look back at people and situations that have been rough on us and see benefits that have resulted. Can we look ahead and do the same thing? As we start to really get depressed or angry or frustrated with someone or something, how might we look for the lesson to be learned? How might we see the eternal benefit that is present in the current situation?

Thomas à Kempis (ca. 1380 – 25 July 1471) was a late Medieval Catholic monk and probable author of The Imitation of Christ, one of the best known Christian books on devotion. Much of this famous book is all about how to have exactly that right frame of mind that sees what should be seen rather than from just a human point of view. "The life of a good religious person should shine in all virtue and be inwardly as it appears outwardly. And it should be the much more inward, for Almighty God beholds the heart and we should always honor and reverence him as if we were always in his bodily presence, and appear before him as angels, clean and pure, shining with all virtue.
We ought every day to renew our purpose in God, and to stir our hearts to fervor and devotion, as though it were the first day of our conversion. And we ought daily to pray and say: help me, my Lord Jesus, that I may persevere in good purpose and in your holy service unto my death, and that I may now today perfectly begin, for I have done nothing in time past."

See you on Sunday!