I urge you to ask God to purge from your heart the vestiges of fear that produce feelings of insignificance and unworthiness. You do God no favor by thinking stingily or meanly about the person who is the apple of God’s eye—you. In The Tempest of God, the Carmelite Iain Matthew writes very movingly of the spirituality of St. John of the Cross, the sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite mystic. At one point, Matthew notes John’s insistence on faith rather than evidence for the development of the relationship with God. Matthew goes on: “The danger envisaged is not so much that we shall trust in the wrong thing, but that we shall stop trusting at all; that, while we may never say it in so many words, we shall cease to believe that we are a factor in God’s life.”

A factor in God’s life! That is how much God values each one of us, according to one of the great mystics and saints of Christianity.

- Excerpted from A Friendship Like No Other by William A. Barry, SJ