There is a great mystery regarding true love.  We do not need to consider at length here all this word offers.  True love always shifts its accent from "I" to "You".  Love in the deepest sense says, "Only you", to the one we love. With this comes a realization that this is not a blotting out of the I, but its deepest fulfillment.  The growing and ripening into perfect love is often, however, a dark passage.   As a rule, pain is closely tied to love like the two sides of a coin.  Only for the truly loving person does love grow and ripen from pain.  Therefore, pain and suffering, when accepted from God, can become the building material of our love for God even when it has to do with the insignificant things of everyday.

Word meditation:
„If I want to please someone very much and I know for certain that I would do this more by wearing a gray dress than any other, regardless how beautiful the dress is, there is no doubt that this dress would please me also and be more appropriate than any other which would be just as good.  If I want to please someone whom I know likes certain words and deeds then I do that and nothing else.  Well then!  Check for yourself how is it with your love!“ (Meister Eckhart p. 129ff)

Whoever has a garden knows that in the Fall there is much debris to be burned.  This burning is an art.  When the flames flare up we know we can add more material to the fire.  At first this seems to smother the flames until the flames have taken hold of the added material and made it burn again.  This image helped me once in a painful, almost unbearable inner situation. The pain which threatened to smother the flame in me in the end became the burning material for the new fire of love.

Pause and look inwardly at the small and large pains and irritations of the past hour.  What can we take and throw into the "fire" of our love as "burning material"?